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A BUDDHIST FOUNDATION in Korea invited poets from around the world to gather for a conference on peace in the summer of 2005. The undertaking seemed less Quixotic and more practical after I learned a little about the figure from whom the Manhae Foundation takes its name.
In Manhae (born Han Yong-un), Koreans can celebrate a great modernist poet who is also a central figure in Korean religion, culture, and politics. An American poet reads with some astonishment that Manhae, a monk and religious reformer who profoundly influenced Buddhist thought and practice, was also a co-author of the Korean Declaration of Independence. Accomplishments comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, achieved by someone born in 1879 (the same year as the American businessman-poet Wallace Stevens).
This unusual, comprehensive centrality of Manhae may tempt even Western poets to feel some tiny glint of reflected glory. It also intimidates us: what can one offer in the context of such an imposing model? At that gathering in Seoul, where poets from around the world were invited to think about the somewhat vague ideal of peace, the challenge was perhaps the more poignant for those of us representing languages that have had no Manhae, no single figure who so thoroughly included the worlds of art and practical politics. That occasion, and the writing of Manhae, inspired the questions I will try to consider here.
On a grand scale, what is the place of poetry in the needy world, where a deficiency of peace for much of the population means hunger, violence, and disease? On an immediate, personal scale, what might be the social or religious or political place of the next poem one writes, in relation to the formidable accomplishment of Manhae in a language and culture we can only begin to understand?
In the context of such questions, and the diffidence they inspire, it is a great relief to turn toward Manhae's poems. These poems present not the political rhetoric of triumph, but intricacies of doubt; and not the religious rhetoric of peace achieved, but peace as the goal of struggle; not salvation, but longing. Far from separating individual psychology from politics or religion, the poems seem determined to blur, or even wipe...