Born in Sachon, South Kyongsang Province, in 1933, Lee Hyong-ki graduated from the Buddhist Studies Department of Dongguk University, Seoul, in 1956. He worked as a journalist in a number of newspapers and rose to be editor-in-chief of the Kukje Shinmun. He later became Professor of Korean Literature at Dongguk University.  
He has published many volumes of poetry, after first collaborating in the anthology Haenomokagi chonui kido (Prayer before sunset, 1955). Important volumes include Chokmak kangsan (Solitary land, 1963), Tolpeigaeui kido (Prayers of a stone pillow, 1971), Pomulsomui chido (Map of Treasure Island, 1985), Shimyaui ilgiyeibo (Midnight Weather-forecast, 1990). He has also published a number of volumes of critical writing, including Kamsongui Nolli (The logic of emotion, 1976), and Hyondaeshi Ch'angjakkyosil (How to write modern poetry, 1991).  
In his earlier work, Lee Hyong-ki focuses on elements of the natural landscape perceived by a solitary subject. The lyricism is traditional, marked by elements of pathetic fallacy, while the human subject finds, in a closer harmony with nature, a new awareness of human finitude and mortality. The themes are universal: twilight and the withering of flowers indicate the transience of existence, the silent contemplation of trees and hills makes us aware of our essential solitude.  
In later poems, however, he echoes other forms of experience as he passes from romantic nihilism to a deeper, more philosophical nihilism. The outside universe becomes more threatening, peopled with monsters and dark shadows that threaten the subject at every moment. Death looms, and in it there are dimensions of violent sensuality to be explored. There is a sense in which the poem itself, once achieved, becomes the only possible form of resistance against ever-threatening despair. 
 
 

Petal-Fall 
 

What can be more beautiful than the departing  
figure of one who knows precisely  
when the time to depart has come?  
Now in high spring  
my love, having endured its passion,  
is wilting away.  
Scattered petal-fall...  
enveloped in the blessings that parting brings  
now that it is time to depart,  
off toward thick summer greenery,  
and then, very soon,  
autumn fruitfulness.  
My springtime is dying like a flower.  
So let us part,  
waving delicately, some day  
when petals are falling heedlessly.  
My love, my parting,  
grieving eyes of my soul maturing  
as water slowly brims in mountain springs. 
 
 

Window 
 

When I lean on you with  
unfathomably contradictory thoughts,  
my longing  
inevitably provokes an image:  
The transparency of my window!  
Day after day  
quietly shutting out  
time that flows past like water.  
Now you link with eternity the fact  
that some day all things  
must be buried in oblivion's shade,  
as if suggesting the reason why we live.  
Gateway to mystery: all complex desires  
vanish, purified;  
you take all this world's trivial daily events  
and put them in their proper place.  
Then every night unfailingly I  
find silence, window, thanks to you  
I foster waiting eyes, enduring  
on and on, and do not despair. 
 
 

A Mountain 
 

This mountain calmly steeps in rain.  
There is none can ever weigh  
the weight that thrones in autumn rain:  
bottomless, endless falling autumn rain.  
Its visage veiled in misty vision,  
the mountain reveals nothing but a silhouette,  
while a thousand years and more of time  
are steeping together in an afternoon of autumn rain.  
Wrapped in this abyss-like solitude,  
perhaps asleep or nearly so,  
eyes half-closed at least  
the mountain, steeping in empty absent-minded rain,  
has nowhere for the memories of ancient wrath to go.  
Towering cliffs and haggard rocks  
overwhelmed by just  
a single gentle curving line,  
while their silhouettes mottled in the autumn rain  
as if glimpsed with eyes misted by tears  
alas cannot be abolished.  
 
 

Map of Treasure Island 
 

Spreading a palm I divine tomorrow.  
A few lines stubbornly extend alone  
while others  
converge into one  
so my hand carries an indecipherable  
map of Treasure Island  
like a trail of which  
only faint traces remain in dense undergrowth;  
the fine lines on my palm are complex as themselves  
yet no matter how twisted and tangled they are,  
all the paths lead to one spot.  
Not to Rome but the ruins of Rome,  
toward the precipice beyond my palm  
and the certain disaster awaiting me there:  
a gust of wind caused by my falling.  
With a fist grasping some of that wind  
some one is banging on the desk.  
Yet I really must find Treasure Island's treasure;  
all the paths end in the precipice leading to it,  
to the Treasure Island beyond it and  
I really must find the cave of treasure  
with the pirates' painted skull and crossbones.  
 
 

Weather Forecast 
 

In midwinter  
even before hearing the midnight weather  
forecast on the radio, I feel uneasy.  
The wind swollen by ill-temper  
carries on its back a trough of low pressure  
one thousand and twenty millibars  
and blows at fifteen meters per second  
as it drives a blizzard up toward the Okhotsk Sea.  
A gale warning  
banning all shipping from the sea  
paralyzing the whole world  
takes my breath away like martial law  
and the suspiciously acting Kamchatka Peninsula  
hangs tied upside-down to the sky  
while the Okhotsk Sea raves mad alone:  
that midwinter midnight weather forecast  
fills me with a snow-storm.  
It is grim like a report of  
global explosion's D-day  
a secret stand-by warning  
sent to fin-de-sie™–cle sensibility  
from somewhere out near Pluto.  
Ready to be ruined  
I am gladly ruined  
so wind, gales, blow on for just three months and ten days.