the civil service examination system, and the rise of the modern media
and publishing system, among other factors. Poetry is no longer the
privileged form of writing that it once was, nor does it serve the public
and institutional functions that it once served. In short, Modern
Poetry has lost the stature and functionality that its traditional
counterpart enjoyed for centuries. Compared with Classical Poetry, it
is marginalized.
If poetry can never regain the multifarious role it once played in a
premodern, pre–Media Age society, Modern Chinese Poetry faces
another difficulty that does not necessarily exist in other literary
traditions. As a new way of writing, Modern Poetry is both challeng-
ing and challenged because, in form and content, in language and aes-
thetic orientation, it isnotClassical Poetry. This is where “modernity”
clashes with “Chineseness.” Developed over a period of more than
two thousand years, Classical Poetry has perfected an aesthetic
paradigm with regard to language (formal or informal, elegant or
folksy, archaic or colloquial), imagery and other figures of speech
(e.g., allusion, symbol, etc.), form (subgenres of shi, song lyric, aria,
etc., each with a prescribed prosody), and content (occasional, public,
private, etc.). Although there is always room for individual variations
and innovations, they usually take place within a well-defined
framework of predecessors as models to be emulated. The paradigmatic
Classical Poetry is super-stable and has remained pretty much the
same over the past millennium. For Modern Poetry to challenge this
paradigm is to challenge Chinese readers’ notion of poetry in a
fundamental way. It is no wonder that to many Chinese readers,
Modern Poetry seems decidedly “unpoetic.” The reason is because
Modern Poetry, as a new aesthetic paradigm, does not meet their
expectations of “poetry” and those expectations are almost solely
based on, and derived from, Classical Poetry.
Moreover, Classical Poetry has not only played multiple roles and
enjoyed high prestige in traditional society and culture, but it has
also been integrated into and is deeply embedded in the Chinese
language itself over the centuries. It is virtually impossible for the
educated to speak and write Chinese without using the phrases,
images, proverbs, and direct quotes from numerous immortalized
verses from the past. Classical Poetry is thus inseparable from the
cultural identity of China. My own experience in interacting with
Chinese audiences at lectures suggests that the more educated Chinese
readers are, the more they tend to adhere to the classical paradigm
and resist Modern Poetry. The adulation by Ezra Pound and other
American Imagists in the early twentieth century only reaffirms the14 Michelle Yeh9781403976079ts03.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 11:08 AM Page 14