Chu was born in Pyongyang, under what was then the Joseon Dynasty. He attended elementary school in Pyongyang, and then middle school at the Meiji Academy in Japan. In May 1919 he fled in exile to Shanghai where he was a reporter for the provisional government newspaper, The Independence. During this time he encountered An Changho and Lee Gwangsu. While in exile in Shanghai he entered Hujiang University to study Chemistry. He graduated from Hogang College in Shanghai in 1925. He was the editor of The Creation, famously the first literary magazine in Korea and was one of the leading figures of the New Poetry movement. In 1979, the South Korean government conferred on him posthumously honors of Rose of Sharon. Additionally, several hymns are composed by him, which contributed development church music of Korea.
Works
Chu was considered a representative poet of the 1920 and 30's and his work can be roughly divided into those poems composed before his exile in Shanghai and those written afterward. His earlier poems, written during his years in Japan, reflect the influence of modern Western and Japanese poetry. The influence of the French symbolist poet Paul Fort is especially evident in pieces such as “Playing with Fire” : in a limpid, clear style he sensitively registers the minutest of impressions and manages to lend them a sensual immediacy. Yohan’s work as a whole more or less reflects a gradual turning away from styles and forms influenced by Western poetry toward traditional Korean poetry. Like Kim Eok, he was a major figure in Korean Literature who pioneered the move away from Western imitation to his literary roots. He articulates the reasons for this shift of inspiration in his critical piece, “To the One Who Would Write a Song”, in which he places the highest value on the creation of beauty and vitality in the Korean language and move on to develop a complete theory of poetry. After 1930, Yohan concentrated on writing sijo, a traditional Korean poetic form, but continued to produce other verse and edited, with others, the poetry anthology Poetry of Three People and an anthology of sijo, Blind Flower.
