I lived from 1587-1671. I was from Korea, and am in the Asian category.
Yun Son-do (1587-1671), whose pen name was Kosan (“Lone Peak”), was born in Seoul. At the age of 26 he passed the civil service exam at the Chinsa level, his passport into government service. He became a scholar, a high-ranking government official in several capacities, and tutor to two princes. However, his straightforward (some would say blunt) character made enemies. Some fellow officials called him the equivalent of a loudmouth, troublemaker or whistleblower. In 1616 he presented a memorandum to the king in which he complained of corruption at court. This won him exile to Kyonwon, where he spent most of the next 13 years and wrote his first cycle of short poems, Kyonhoe-yo (“Songs to Expel the Gloom”). In 1628, after a more tolerant king (Injo) succeeded to power, Yun became personal tutor to Injo’s two young princes. During the Manchu Invasion of 1628, he again won the disfavor of the court, and – you guessed it --was again exiled. This one didn’t last long. Recalled to court, Yun continued over the next few years to bring trouble down on his own head by writing memos to the king reporting improper activities by the government and certain officials. Eventually such behavior earned him another exile, from which he was not pardoned until 1668, only three years before his death in 1671 at the age of 85. His years of exile were spent in his countryside home, were he studied and wrote poetry. His most famous sijo are a six-sijo sequence known as the Ou-ga ("Song of Five Friends") and a 40-verse cycle titled Obu Sasi-sa ("The Fisherman's Calendar"). He and Chong Chol (1536-1593) are considered Korea's finest poets; many critics consider Yun the finest sijo poet of all. Seventy-six of his sijo have come down to us. He holds an exalted position in Korean literature comparable to that of Shakespeare in English, Basho in Japanese and Cervantes in Spanish. If you want to ponder an amazing coincidence, consider that all three of these other immortal poets were alive and writing at some time during Yun’s long life. His family estate in Cholla is now a museum.
