Baek Seok

Baek Seok (born Paek Kihaeng; July 1, 1912 - January 7, 1995), was a Korean poet.

He was born in Chŏngju in North Pyongan, and started his journalist career at Chosun Ilbo in 1934. He published his first poem "정주성 (Chŏngju Fortress)" on 31 August 1935 issue of Chosun Ilbo. On January 20 next year, he personally published a collection of the poems he had written entitled Deer (사슴, Sasŭm). Even though Deer contained 33 poems, many of which were new, 7 of them were already published on magazines or newspaper in slightly different forms. Until 1948, he published about 60 more pieces, but is not believed to have produced another poetry book.

In the Republic of Korea, the publication of his works was strictly prohibited for a while because he was labelled as a North Korean poet and a communist. However, since 1987 when a collection of his works (poems and essays) were first introduced after the Korean War, he has been widely re-evaluated by scholars and critics.He is now regarded as having opened a new face of Korean socialist modernism with a group of literary writers.

South Koreans long believed that Baek Seok had died on a collective farm in 1963.However, recently it was revealed that he lived until 1996. In 2007, he was listed by the Korean Poets' Association among the ten most important modern Korean poets.

He wrote native, rural poems. His representative poems are <통영>, <고향>, <북방에서>, <적막강산>. An overarching keyword in his poems is nostalgia.