Born in Hwanghae Province in 1936, Yu Kyong-hwan graduated from Yonsei University and received his doctorate in journalism from Dongguk University. He began his career as a poet in 1957 when his work was first published in the journal Hyondae Munhak. In 1970 he received the Hyondae Munhak Literary Award. For forty years he worked as a journalist, mainly with the Choson Ilbo and the Munhwa Ilbo newspapers, where he was above all editor in charge of cultural matters and editorialist. He was long active in the World Poets' Congress and served as President of the Korean Association of Writers of Children's Literature. He is at present Professor of Journalism at Yonsei University and head of the Korean Academy for Children's Literature.
 Yu Kyong-hwan has published eleven volumes of poetry, beginning in 1969 with Kamjong jido (Map of feelings). Other volumes include San noul (Mountain dusk, 1972), I chagun na ui saenun (My little bird, 1977), Honja son namu (Tree standing alone, 1985), Noraero kanun pae (Boat driven by song, 1991). His most recent volume is Wonmi-dong sichip (Wonmi-dong poetry book, 1997).
 Yu Kyong-hwan's poetry is marked by a lyric lightness of touch. He is almost Wordsworthian in his relationship to his own childhood, drawing on a vast store of childhood experiences, memories, and dreams as he evokes an experience of nature filtered through the eyes of a lost innocence. In poem after poem he stresses that nature is the realm of childhood and leads the reader to a freshness of experience by employing only very delicate poetic means.

A child is gazing up
at petals floating high
above a tree, without a breeze.

A child is hanging by its chin
from the edge of a cloud that rises and falls
above a spire, without any breeze.

When there was no one the child could tell
that the thing it most wanted to do
was to go floating high

it would dream in broad daylight in an empty village
dreams as tall as the telegraph poles,
soaring higher than petals or clouds.

That child is myself, alone until now,
determined not to grow old.

Sending the name of the one I yearn for
on ahead
high up like a kite

setting off
calling
calling that name

though I walk
a full half day
my legs do not ache.

Somewhere
heaven
and earth must touch

setting off
calling
calling that name

the narrow path
finally vanishes in the grass
like the one I yearn for.

What shall I draw?
What shall I draw
with my birthday present crayons?

As I color thickly a torrential forest,
the toy ball beside me
looks on with eyes that say: That's not right.

As I draw a daytime moon,
the sky turns into an ocean and the moon, like a bead,
from which a toy rabbit is looking down.

As I draw one really huge tree,
the bird in the calendar
longs to fly down and perch there.

Water babbling

The rainbow-like bridge
at Sonam Temple in Cholla's Sungju County
is a rainbow in stone.

It sends all sorrowful things flowing down
in mountain streams
and ever lives on nothing but breezes.

Lovely mountain light released as tinted leaves
for a long long time
remains caught in the stream's clear shadows.

In evenings when stars are most lovely,
murmuring that this world and that are united:
water babbling under the stone rainbow.

While I am looking at one star,
that star is likewise looking at me.

I wonder if you are thinking of me as much
as I am thinking of you?

While the star is coming to me,
the nights are short as short can be.

On winter nights, more than in summer,
the star comes closer to me.

Now it's winter for me.