Book excerpt: The book contains the collected poems of Pak Yong-chŏl (1904–1938), one of the pioneers of modern Korean poetry. Living in an age when the whole nation was suffering from lack of national pride and futuristic vision for the country, Pak Yong-chŏl sought the meaning of his life in exploring the beauty of the Korean language in his lyric poems. Pak Yong-chŏl’s life was like a flash of lightning. Living at a time when the whole nation was suffering from spiritual torpor, he had to cope with his physical illness that eventually deprived him of life in his mid-thirties. He was a believer in “art for art’s sake” at a time when a number of writers were leaning to politico-social ideologies. Despite the paucity of his remaining poems, he is to be remembered as one who was eager to live and die with an ardor for the essential beauty of poesy flowing from Parnassus. His name was writ in blood, if Keats’s in water.