Poet Ko Un Publishes 40 Years of Love Letters: Sanghwajeol Letters 1

A Literary Chronicle of Marriage, Memory and Devotion — From Seoul in 1983 to Three Decades of Life in Anseong

SEOUL, September 2026 — At a time when handwritten letters are rapidly disappearing from everyday life, Korean poet Ko Un, one of the major literary voices of his generation, has opened an extraordinary archive of intimacy to the public with the publication of Sanghwajeol Letters 1.

Written over more than four decades to Lee Sang-hwa, Professor Emeritus of Chung-Ang University, his wife, lifelong companion and literary partner, the volume gathers more than 1,000 pages of letters, poems, drawings, reflections and calligraphy. What begins as a record of private correspondence gradually expands into something far larger: a meditation on love, marriage, aging, memory, artistic creation and the meaning of a human life.

The book has been described as a major literary event precisely because of its unusual premise: an elderly poet continuing to write, over decades, intimate literary messages addressed to one person.

Ko Un himself captures the spirit of the work in its opening words:

“I enjoy the tranquil light of the reason for my existence through the happiness of writing a letter to my wife, Sanghwa, since coming into this world.”

The sentence is quiet. Its implications are not.

It presents writing not merely as a profession, but as a form of existence—and love not simply as an emotion, but as a discipline of attention sustained across time.

A Love Story Written by Hand

Sanghwajeol Letters 1 emerges from a remarkable personal ritual.

Ko Un gave his wife’s birthday a special name, “Sanghwajeol,” treating it almost as a national holiday of the heart. He made and hung flags and banners himself, transforming the domestic space into a celebration of the woman to whom the letters were addressed.

He also kept a “Sanghwa Bell,” associated with the tradition of Sangwon Temple on Mount Odaesan, in their home and rang it each morning as an expression of love and respect.

Over the years, letters accumulated alongside poems, drawings and elegant handwriting. In their totality, these materials transform the history of one marriage into a literary document of remarkable scale.

The private becomes historical.

The domestic becomes poetic.

And the simple act of writing a letter becomes a record of time itself.

From a Wedding in Seoul to Thirty Years in Anseong

The story begins with a wedding on May 5, 1983, in Suyu-ri, Seoul.

In his preface, “Before,” Ko Un recalls a gathering that reads today almost like a chapter from the intellectual history of modern Korea. Among those connected with the ceremony were figures such as Ham Seok-hun, who officiated with an interpretation of the I Ching; Park Yong-gil, who composed a congratulatory scroll poem in court style; Moon Ik-hwan, who recited it; Professor Lee Young-hee, who moderated the ceremony; and intellectuals including Ahn Byung-moo, Lee Moon-young, Paik Nak-chung and Kim Koo-yong.

The ceremony belonged to one era.

The marriage would live through several more.

The first volume particularly illuminates the couple’s thirty years in Anseong, where they cultivated a life close to the earth while continuing their intellectual and artistic pursuits.

Here, the poet’s understanding of love appears inseparable from humility, labor and shared existence. The humility he had encountered during his youthful years in Buddhist temples, he suggests, reached a deeper fulfillment in the life he built with his wife.

Love, in these pages, is not presented as youthful excitement alone. It is love transformed by years.

The Poet Who Continued to Write

The publication also forms part of an extraordinary late period in Ko Un’s creative life.

Even during years of withdrawal from public life, the poet continued writing. His recent output includes the approximately 1,200-page epic Cheong, published in 2023, followed by Record of the Wind and the five-volume Poems of the World series.

Sanghwajeol Letters 1 now adds another dimension to this remarkable body of late work.

It is not simply another book by a prolific poet. It is an archive of a relationship—and of the consciousness of a writer confronting time.

The handwriting itself becomes significant.

Every page carries evidence of the physical act of writing: the movement of the hand, the passage of years, the persistence of memory. In an age of keyboards, instant messages and disappearing correspondence, the handwritten letter acquires an almost archaeological value.

A Second Volume Is Already Planned

The story is not finished.

Ko Un has announced plans to publish Sanghwajeol Letters 2 next year, bringing together the remaining letters and materials from the Anseong years through the present, timed to coincide with Sanghwa’s 80th birthday in 2027.

The continuation will extend the literary record of a relationship that has already crossed more than four decades.

That Ko Un is still preparing another volume gives the project an unusual vitality. The letters are not merely documents of the past; they remain part of an ongoing literary act.

Even as age makes the physical act of handwriting increasingly demanding, the poet’s creative determination remains undiminished.

A Monument to the Letter

The significance of Sanghwajeol Letters 1 reaches beyond Korean literary history.

The great epistolary traditions of world literature have often preserved relationships, intellectual friendships, political debates and private confessions that would otherwise have vanished. Letters can reveal a writer in a way that published books cannot: unguarded, immediate, intimate and addressed to a particular human being.

Ko Un’s collection belongs to this tradition, while simultaneously challenging it.

Here is an extraordinary literary corpus written not for an anonymous readership, but for one beloved recipient.

Over forty years, the poet transformed the letter into a sustained literary form.

The result is neither simply a collection of love letters nor merely an autobiography. It is a poetics of companionship—a record of how two people share time, how a poet observes another human being, and how love can become inseparable from the practice of writing.

In an era when paper correspondence is disappearing, the very materiality of these pages matters.

Paper remembers.

Ink ages.

Handwriting changes.

And the accumulated pages preserve what digital communication so often loses: the physical trace of one human being reaching toward another.

From Private Love to Universal Memory

The deepest achievement of Sanghwajeol Letters 1 may therefore lie in its ability to move beyond biography.

A marriage becomes a literary landscape.

A home becomes an archive.

A birthday becomes a festival.

A bell becomes a daily gesture of devotion.

And letters written to one woman become a meditation that can be read by thousands.

Ko Un’s work reminds us that literature does not always begin with the ambition to speak to the world.

Sometimes it begins with the desire to speak truthfully to one person.

The world comes later.

In this sense, Sanghwajeol Letters 1 is an important event in contemporary literature: a vast handwritten testament to love, memory and the persistence of the literary imagination.

Forty years of letters.
Thirty years of life in Anseong.
One enduring recipient.
And a poet still writing.

In an age of disappearing paper, Ko Un has given the letter another life.