Publication of Han Yong-un’s "The Silence of Love"

Han Yong-un, a Buddhist monk and one of the March First representatives, published the poetry collection "The Silence of Love", whose longing for the lost "beloved" carried the will for independence.

Han Yong-un had called for Buddhist reform in "On the Revitalization of Korean Buddhism" (1913) and, as one of the 33 national representatives in 1919, signed the Declaration of Independence. After prison he published "The Silence of Love" in 1926. As the preface says — "not only the beloved is beloved; all that one longs for is the beloved" — the "nim" reads at once as lover, Buddha and homeland, and the poems sing of faith in reunion even after the beloved has gone.

The 1920s also saw resistance poems such as Yi Sang-hwa’s "Does Spring Come to Stolen Fields?" (1926) and the proletarian "new tendency" literature of KAPF (1925). Han refused to collaborate to the end and died in 1944, a year before liberation.