musical. As noted above, Zheng has been instrumental in injecting a
sense of the musical into modern Chinese literature. “‘[L]yric,’” as
David Lindley argues, “is held to apply to poems employing a first-
person speaker, and, by extension, to indicate a preoccupation with
the expression of individual feeling or emotion” (Lindley 1985: 2).
Lyrical poetry, like much of Zheng Chouyu’s own corpus, tends to be
succinct. Helen Vendler has argued that the unitary subject of the lyric
is so powerful and so crisply worded that one is tempted to read the
lyric poem over and over until the reader virtually assumes the voice of
the speaker in the poem. Thus, in the lyric, the reader is no longer a
reader “but an utterer” (Vendler 1995: xi). Fredric Jameson’s reinter-
pretation of Baudelaire’s poetry as emblematic of a new phase in
capitalism, and thus as a new notion of the sublime, affords us some
useful tools in connecting the highly aestheticized and near eremitic
atmosphere of Zheng Chouyu’s lyricism with a profound sense of the
political and historical (Jameson 1985: 247–263). For Zheng Chouyu,
the economistic reading that Jameson applies to Baudelaire may not be
so relevant, but surely submerged in the suggestive stanzas of Zheng’s
laconic poetry lurks a strong element of political upheaval, of histori-
cal tumult. This tumult has called into question the very integrity of
the Chinese nation state in the middle of the twentieth century. But
even as his poetry articulates in repressed and oblique ways the
upheaval of multiple wars and an exodus from mainland Chinese to
the impermanent island asylum of Taiwan, it also is the historical
product of a new dispensation. Hardly without its own brand of polit-
ical repression, this new dispensation nevertheless afforded select
intellectuals in Taiwan in the early 1950s, preoccupied with neither
upholding nor challenging this nascent cold war ideology, a carefully
proscribed space within which to stretch their stylistic wings and carve
out a totally new arena for “pure” literature. With a freshly brewing
war in Korea, a “surrogate” war between the United States and the
PRC, Taiwan became an indispensable geopolitical pawn in this
cold war. Within Taiwan, the Chiang Kai-shek regime was afforded
relative carte blanche to place a lock on political power. Within this
framework, however, there was room for experimentation of a literary
nature. Thus, in Taiwan, the time was ripe for the practitioners of a
mature Modernism—the sort that eventually was exhibited by Zheng
Chouyu and others such as Luo Fu and Ya Xian (also represented in
this volume)—to take the fully digested components of the previous
half century’s formalistic trials and experiments and begin creating
sophisticated verse in various ways, depending on the style of each.
Zheng Chouyu was at least one of the people for whom it may be
Zheng Chouyu and Lyric Poetry 33