Afterwards, due to increasing wartime censorship by the Japanese colonial government, he continued writing privately but did not publish any further poetry until after the liberation of Korea.

The body of Pak Mog-wol's work at this time established a new trend in Korean poetry, one that attempted to express childlike innocence and wonder at life through folk songs and dialectal poetic language.

Among such poems, "The Wayfarer" (나그네) is notable and was set by the musician Isang Yun as the last in his early song book Dalmuri (A Halo, 1950).

Now he strove to incorporate the pain, death, and even monotony of daily existence into his poetry without maintaining a standard of sentimental and lyrical quality.

His later poems, however, represent a return to the use of vivid colloquial language as the medium through which to express the color and vitality of local culture.

His collection of poems from this later stylistic phase, Fallen Leaves in Gyeongsang-do (Gyeongsang-doui garangnip) provides the artistic forum through which he is able to further explore his earlier questions of the relationship between light and dark, happiness and despair, and life and death.

Pak's poetry, especially his later work, reveals a fervent love for life that does not wane despite his diligent acknowledgment of the ever-present threat of the end.

He is celebrated for the cautious optimism of his work and his ability to subtly internalize conflicts of empiric reality in his deceptively localized and dialectal poetry.