Ku Sang

Ku Sang was a Korean poet, considered one of Korea's most respected and trusted poets. He was raised in Wonsan, in South Hamgyeong Province which is now situated in North Korea. His parents were Catholic and his older brother was a priest, but after studying in Japan he had a crisis of faith and only returned to Catholicism later in life. He worked as a journalist and writer in the north, but fled to the south after the Liberation in 1945 due to the Communist oppression. He served as an editorial writer for the Kyunghyang Shinmun, a lecturer on poetry at Chung-Ang University, and a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. He suffered from tuberculosis for many years and died in 2004. His poetry is marked by a rejection of the refined symbolism and artificial rhetoric found in the work of some of his contemporaries. Instead, he often began his poems with the evocation of a personal moment of perception, in the midst of the city or of nature, and moved from there to considerations of more general import, where the poem frequently turned into a meditation on the presence of Eternity in the midst of time. He also wrote essays on literature, social issues and religion, as well as plays and anthologies. He spoke out clearly on the ecological issues, pinpointing the pollution of the Han River as not only a crime against nature but as a symbol of the moral corruption of contemporary humanity. He was widely translated and recognized as a major religious poet of great originality and utter personal integrity.