[Editorial] Midang dies, leaves poetic legacy

Poet So Chong-Ju, better known as Midang, his pen name, died on a white Christmas. We lost another literary magnate after novelist Hwang Soon-Won, who died in September.

We feel sorry that an era of Korean literature seems to be disappearing into history in the wake of the demises of two.

Midang, fighting disease, reportedly used to say that his heart could not but be sick because he used it up for 60 years. Evidently, Midang presented richness to our tired lives for more than a half century by translating our folk sentiments into poems.

More than 1,000 poems he left behind showed how beautifully our language could be written. Several poems, including "Before Chrysanthemum," many people love to read, were carried in textbooks, and there would be few among our people who could not recite one or two of his poems.

When talking about his poetic world, his intellectual energy always makes a primary topic. Once he establishes his own poetic world, he never stays there, but sets out to search for something new ceaselessly in such a way as to find another poetic world. That he had traveled numerous places and he went to Russia for study in his 70s proves how diligent the old poet refusing to live peacefully in one poetic world is. His continuous quest for a new world has become a whipping to his junior literary persons.

As many people agree, it would have been better for him to purely devote himself to literature always.

Some talk about the fact that he wrote some pro-Japanese poems during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945) and that he cooperated with the Chun Doo-Hwan government in time of the Fifth Republic inauguration.

However, the poet did not make any poor excuses. Rather, he frankly admitted what he did. And without being fettered by what he did, he begged the public pardon by making more active efforts. This fierce spirit for creative writing of the deceased left nothing to be desired in making him one of the most familiar poets of the Koreans. Beyond his glory and disgrace, what he left to us is much more and bigger.

When the world is in trouble, a poem touches the mind of the people very greatly. Whenever the nation was in trouble and difficulty, Midang made us cry sometimes and laugh other times with his jewels of poems. Perhaps, now is the time when we are missing a poem like that. Thereupon, it seems the vacancy he left is bigger than any other time and we feel empty as we wonder who will fill it and how. It is the share of his juniors to think what our literary world can do in order to cherish the literary spirit of the deceased.