avant-garde poetry from china 3acute concern, but such speculation and the limits of living memory
aside, it is a fact that in the last one hundred years or so Chinese po-
etry has crossed several watersheds. It has moved from one language
to another, from relative self-containment to vigorous interaction with
foreign traditions and from entanglement with politics and society to
the mixed blessings of autonomy—or, depending on one’s perspective,
of marginality.
After the last imperial dynasty had collapsed and the Republic
of China emerged (1911), champions of change such as Hu Shi and
Chen Duxiu advocated literature in a colloquial, modern language,
in what has gone down in history as the Literary Revolution (᭛ᄺ䴽
ੑ) of 1917, triggered in the pages of New Youth (ᮄ䴦ᑈ). Vernacular
usage (ⱑ䆱᭛) was to supersede the classical Chinese (᭛㿔᭛) that
had been the exclusive medium of high literature. The classical and
the vernacular were not different linguistic registers but distinct lan-
guages, as far apart as Latin and present-day French. Incidentally, for
all their modernity, many vernacular texts from the first years and
decades after the Literary Revolution were still anything but colloqui-
al. They retained heavy traces of classical Chinese and incorporated
many neologisms of foreign origin. A New Poetry (ᮄ䆫), in free verse
as well as foreign and indigenous modern forms, set out to replace
a time-honored tradition whose rigidity and elitism were now felt to
thwart the development of a modern literature, and by implication of
a modern society. The drive for literary reform was motivated in large
part by social concerns and was by no means a purely aesthetic affair,
so the Way was never far away. Crucially, however, now that poetry
was no longer an integral part of officialdom, China’s poets lost their
self-evident social status. As scholars such as Lloyd Haft and Michelle
Yeh have shown, they began to grapple with an identity crisis and
problems of legitimation that continue to this day, forcing them to
reconsider why, how, what and for whom they wrote.^2
If in early modern times the marriage of Chinese literature and poli-
tics became uneasy, in the public sphere its fundamental validity was
rarely questioned with any profound impact. The period up to the
1940s saw foreign-influenced experimentation and heated debate on
the New Poetry and its social obligations, by authors whose work is
regularly reprinted in China and has been translated into many lan-
(^2) Haft 1989: “Introduction,” Yeh 1991a: ch 1.