Yi Yuksa was a Korean poet and independence activist born in Andong in 1904. Born Yi Won-rok, he was repeatedly imprisoned for anti-colonial activities under Japanese rule. His best-known works include “Green Grapes,” “The Summit” and “Wilderness.” He died in 1944 while detained in Beijing.
A place in Korean culture
Yi is remembered in Korean modern literature as both a major resistance poet and an independence activist. His poems gave compressed, vivid form to the violence of colonial reality and to an insistence on freedom.
What else to know
His poems do not offer easy optimism. Their power comes from refusing to look away from hardship while still imagining what might exist beyond it. Images from “The Summit” and “Wilderness” continue to ask how a person chooses to stand inside difficult circumstances.
The story behind it
“The Summit” ends at a point where there is nowhere left to retreat, with the striking image of a ‘rainbow made of steel.’ Dear Now does not equate the poem’s colonial-era reality with an athlete’s injury; instead, it places its image of standing at a limit beside Yeo Seo-jeong’s long return to competition.
