Byeon Yeong-ro
South Korean poet
Byeon Yeong-ro (Korean: 변영로; 1898–1961), also known by the art name Suju (수주), was a Korean poet and English literature scholar. His original name was Byeon Yeong-bok (변영복; 卞榮福), but he changed his name in 1958. He is considered a pioneer of modern Korean poetry and is well known for the poem, "Nongae" (논개), which was included in South Korean government-issued textbooks from 1953 to 2003.
Biography
Byeon was born in Seoul in 1898. He began studying English in 1915 when he was 17 years old and graduated from a three-year English language course in only six months. In 1923, he became a lecturer at Ewha Womans University, and in 1931, he went to the United States to study at San José State University. In 1946, he became an English professor at Sungkyunkwan University. In 1955, he was elected the first chairman of the Korean PEN association.
Byeon died of throat cancer in 1961.
Works
Cosmos – An English poem written in 1918, published in the magazine Youth (청춘)
Non-Gae – A poem published in 1922 about the spirit of Nongae
Sa-Byeuk song
MyungJeong 40nyun – Essay published in 1953 about a drunkard living through life.
“Byeon Yeong-ro” enters the record as south Korean poet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Byeon, Yeong-ro and South can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q11245147. VIAF identifies the subject as 21015626. The Library of Congress control number is n81147732. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1961, 1958 and 1953.
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This entry incorporates text from “Byeon Yeong-ro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.