The formal revolution clearly illustrates the experimental spirit of
Modern Chinese Poetry to “make it new.” The first collection of
Modern Poetry, by Hu Shi, published in 1920, is appropriately titled
Experiments嘗. In the May Fourth period, it was poetry more
than any other genre that played the role of the avant-garde on the
cultural scene. In postwar Taiwan, poetry spearheaded the modernist
movement with the founding of the Modernist School by
Ji Xian(b. 1913) in February 1956. The Modern Poetry Debate
in Taiwan in 1972–74 was an immediate precursor to the Nativist
Literature Movement鄉¡文¢£in 1977–79, which changed the
course of Taiwan literature for decades to come. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, it was underground poetry and Misty Poetry that ushered
in a renaissance in post-Mao China and heralded the Root-Seeking
Movement in the mid-1980s.
With complete freedom in form, modern poets have engaged in
theoretical discussions about the relation between form and content.
What is the rationale for using, say, the quatrain instead of the
couplet? Why divide a poem into stanzas at all? What about the ever-
vexing question of prose poetry? Is it poetry or prose? In the early
1920s to the late 1930s, a variety of foreign forms was introduced into
China. Lu Zhiwei 陸%¥ (1894–1970) and Zhu Xiang 朱§
(1904–33) were among the pioneers to experiment with them. Wen
Yiduo advanced the ideal of “tailoring the clothes to the body”
̈C©衣, meaning to give a poem a clear sense of structure while
simultaneously relating it organically to the content. Besides the
Crescent School 月of which Wen was a leader, other poets such
as Wu Xinghua 吳興( (1921–66) and Bian Zhilin ® ̄琳
(1910–2000) also experimented with regular forms of their own
making. Finally, in the mid-1950s, the Modernist School in Taiwan
advocated the notion that “content determines form.”
With the old rules governing rhyme, tones, the number of lines in a
poem, and the number of characters in a line abandoned, poets could
begin to explore the modern vernacular to its fullest potential as the
new medium. Although free verse has been the most common form
from 1917 onward, Modern Chinese Poetry employs a wide range of
forms, from various regular forms to prose poetry and concrete
poetry. The regular forms are either borrowed from other literary tra-
ditions, such as the sonnet, or from modified traditional Chinese
forms, such as the modern “quatrain” ±². Although the sonnet from
the West is no less restrictive than traditional Chinese forms, it is
rather freely adapted by Chinese poets. Prose poetry and concrete
poetry are distinctly modern forms. The first has established a minorModern Chinese Poetry 219781403976079ts03.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 11:08 AM Page 21