synonymous with wilderness as much as with willfulness: “I’m a child
who had been wrested away from tradition, and had grown up on a
deserted land, and I cannot give up happiness and willfulness” (Gu
1995: 922). Accordingly, Gu Cheng’s poetics from the very beginning
is one of metamorphosis, with emphasis on “willfulness,” or “renxing,”
by which Gu Cheng literally means following (or indulging) one’s
own inborn nature. Two of Gu Cheng’s representative poems from
his early period, “A Fantasia to Life” and “I Am a Willful Child” (Wo
shi yige renxing de haizi) (1981), are excellent illustrations of this
poetics.
Apparently, this vision of a “child” feeling entirely at home in
nature is largely anthrocentric and anthropomorphized and is “will-
fully” Romantic. We can easily find among twentieth-century world
poets, particularly among those who once found themselves in the
“new world” of displacement and exile, a completely opposite under-
standing of nature. W.H. Auden, himself a naturalized resident in the
“new world” of America, once said that nature in European literature
“is humanized, mythologized, usually friendly” whereas in America
“nature was virgin, devoid of history, usually hostile” (Auden 1975a:
363). According to Auden, the often romanticized golden image of
“child in nature” has instead a much more somber and less nostalgic
ring for an American poet such as Robert Frost (Auden 1975b). For
the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, the “impersonal cruelty” of the uni-
verse is what quintessentially defines nature, particularly in the form
of wilderness, and there is an inherent enmity and mutual alienation
between humans and nature (Milosz 1982: 24). Hence the perfect
union as achieved in “child in nature” is deemed nothing but a
Romantic illusion, or a deceptive fairytale.
The early Gu Cheng seems much less aware of—or deliberately
turning a blind eye to—such anti-Romantic and much darker readings
of nature and wilderness. But on the other hand, Gu Cheng’s idealiza-
tion of nature has its own raison d’être and is itself a deliberate act of
rebellion against any existing and repressive cultural and social order,
a sentiment shared by his fellow “misty” poets in a post–Cultural
Revolution context.^2 That is to say, this idealized nature serves an
“anticulture” agenda and promises fresh possibilities for language,
poetry, and human existence in general:
Of course, at the germinal stage of language, there is a kind of fresh
sensibility, like newly emerging leaves and birdsong, which is still a part
of nature, remaining at a dangerous place, providing alternative
possibilities and choices for human existence. (Gu 1995: 928)126 Yibing Huang