Unlike poetry written in the vernacular, classical Korean poetry was heavily influenced by the great poets of the Tang and Sung dynasties and was written in Chinese, while reflecting a perspective which was uniquely Korean. Gathering poets from the ninth century through the nineteenth, this is the first and only comprehensive anthology of classical Korean poetry to appear in English.

This anthology presents well over a hundred Korean classical poems known as shijo, in English translation. Shijo, a form of poetic composition still very much alive, has a tradition spanning a thousand years. One of the first historical anthologies of shijo in English, this book offers an overview of that uniquely Korean poetic legacy. Composed in the vernacular and written down in hang l, the Korean phonograms, shijo asserts its national identity, which hanshi, composed in the classical Chinese ideograms, ostensibly may not. Sung-Il Lee's English rendition of shijo captures the rhythmic flow of the original lines in Korean, while remaining true to the sound quality and the poetic message contained therein. Although the book is meant for the general readers, students of Korean language and literature will find it helpful, as it provides parallel texts-the Korean original and its English rendition. About the translator: Sung-Il Lee was born in 1943 in Seoul, Korea. He studied English literature at Yonsei University (B.A., 1967), the University of California at Davis (M.A., 1973) and Texas Tech University (Ph.D., 1980), and taught at Yonsei University (1981-2008). He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto (1987), the University of Washington (1994 1995), and Troy University (2002 2003). He is now Professor Emeritus at Yonsei University. His publication includes The Wind and the Waves: Four Modern Korean Poets (1989), The Moonlit Pond: Korean Classical Poems in Chinese (1998), The Brush and the Sword: Kasa, Korean Classical Poems in Prose (2009), Blue Stallion: Poems of Yu Chi-whan (2011) and Beowulf and Four Related Old English Poems: A Verse Translation with Explanatory Notes (2010). He received the Republic of Korea Literary Award (1990) and the Korean Literature Translation Award (1999), both given by the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation.