One day, several weeks after the army swept into Gangjin, the North Korean officers assembled Young Jae with his peers to recruit volunteers, as Hyung Jae, who attended the same school as Young Jae, told me. Egged on by his classmates and teachers, Young Jae, only 15 years old, stepped forward, and was soon taken to a village 20 miles away for a week of basic training before marching out to the front. When his mother learned of his decision, she rushed to stop him, walking 20 miles on a winding mountain dirt path with her infant daughter on her back. But Young Jae rebuffed her, his brothers recalled. “Why did you come? You’re making me lose my nerve. Just go home,” he said. His mother gave him one last smile. “I got to see you, and that’s all I needed,” she said. Decades later, Young Jae would say that he never forgot that image of his mother, walking away into the sunset for what would be the last time he saw her.

Keun Jae and Hyung Jae speculated that their brother’s decision was motivated not by ideology, but by a desire to escape from an unhappy home life, one where he felt excluded from his parents’ affection. In the 1990 interview, Young Jae admitted that he “had no political beliefs to speak of” when he left home.

The war marked Oh Young Jae’s artistic awakening. Young Jae was quickly plunged into battle, shooting at “black shapes,” as he wrote in a memoir, running in his direction and watching them crumple to the ground. In August 1950, he fought in the Battle of Pusan Perimeter, one of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War. In Jakbyeol (or “Farewell”), a poetic memoir of his wartime experiences, Young Jae recounted the first time he saw his reflection in a cracked mirror after that battle. Discovering the fresh stubble on his face, he was startled by the “strange youth … blankly gazing back at him,” and he mourned the loss of his “boyhood days.”

As the North Korean army retreated back up the peninsula in 1951, passing through a farming village in Gangwon province, Oh Young Jae came across a charred book of North Korean poetry, published for the soldiers. This seems to have triggered his creative desires. Sitting atop munition crates, he began writing his own poems. “I began to write poetry because I was constantly overcome with the desire to cry out, to express something,” Oh said in a 2003 interview. “Wartime is filled with days where emotions come together: rage and sadness, tears and hatred.” In 1953, while still a soldier, he published his first poem, Gaengdoneun gipeoganda (“The mine shaft grows deeper”), a fiery diatribe against American imperialism that uses the image of a deepening of a mine shaft as a metaphor for the enemy’s impending death.

After his discharge in 1957, Oh settled in Pyongyang, where he worked as a heating technician and continued to publish poetry, everything from anti-American polemics to socialist paeans. His work, printed in newspapers and literary journals, eventually caught the eye of the central party, which sponsored his college education and put him through a poetry training program. By 1965, Oh was a state-propaganda poet working for the central party. The North Korea expert and literary critic Noh Kwi Nam, who authored an essay about Oh Young Jae, told me that at the time “the party placed writers at the fore of their propaganda and agitation efforts.” Poetry also lent itself well to the regime’s aims of conveying succinct, evocative scenes of socialist nation building. “North Korea puts a lot of weight on everyday experiences,” Noh said. “So they often send writers out to the field in person, be it a mine shaft or a farm.”