[1] A voluminous writer of nature poetry, Pak Tu-jin is chiefly notable for the way he turned his subjects into symbols of the newly emerging national situation of Korea in the second half of the 20th century.

After Korea's liberation from Imperial Japanese rule, Pak co-founded the Korean Young Writers' Association alongside Kim Dongni, Cho Yeonhyeon, and Seo Jeongju.

This was the Blue Deer Anthology (Cheongnokjip, 1946), which was followed by individual collections of his own, Hae (The Sun, 1949), Odo (A Prayer at Noon, 1953) and several more, all distinguished by their treatment of nature.

With the onset of the 1970s, when he published such collections as Chronicles of Water and Stone (Suseok yeoljeon, 1973) and Poongmuhan, the nature of his poetry evolved once again; founded now on private self-realization, these poems are often said to reveal Pak's attainment of the absolute pinnacle of self-discovery at which ‘infinite time and space are traveled freely.’ As such, Pak, known as an artist who elevated poetry to the level of ethics and religion, is today evaluated more as a poet of thematic consciousness than of technical sophistication.

[5] His poem "Peaches Are in Bloom" is a good example of the way his rapturous and incantatory verse unites cultural and personal references to make it expressively symbolic of his country.