Yi Yuk-sa
Also called: Yi Won-rok
Poet and independence activist of the Heroic Corps, author of "The Wilderness" and "The Summit", who died in a Beijing jail
Born Yi Won-rok at Wonchon in Dosan, Andong, he was a descendant of Yi Hwang (Toegye). Implicated with his brothers in Jang Jin-hong's 1927 bombing of the Bank of Chosen's Daegu branch, he spent more than a year in prison, and is said to have taken his pen name Yuksa from his prisoner number, 264.
In 1932 he went to Nanjing and entered the cadre school the Uiyeoldan had set up there, graduating in its first class in 1933. Back in Korea he worked as a journalist and wrote poems and criticism, and was imprisoned seventeen times in all for his part in the independence movement. In "Green Grapes," "Climax" and "The Wilderness" he sang of a will unbroken by "the lash of a bitter season" and of a hero who would come "riding a white horse" to the wilderness.
In 1943 he planned to bring weapons into Korea from Beijing; arrested on his return home, he was taken to Beijing and died in the prison of the Japanese consulate-general there on 16 January 1944. His poems were collected after liberation as Yuksa sijip (1946). He was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation (Patriotism Medal) in 1990.