said—he was the right person in the right place at the right time. Part
of this is certainly some sort of innate poetic gift that only a few pos-
sess—access to a muse, if you will. Part of it was another sort of
access: access to high quality education (as the son of a prominent
educator in the military) (Zhang Meifang 2001: 257). And part of it
was the historical milieu that allowed for relative peace at the center of
a global storm that still raged, a storm that gave those in power the
confidence that Washington DC would turn a blind eye to the excesses
of political repression deemed necessary in the ultimate name of the
“Free World.” But while others preferred to serve as the collective
mouthpiece for this sort of worldview, most of the Modernist poets
(in various camps) elected to ply their own literary trade. It would be
naive to assume there was no political tincture to their work. One
must remember that poetry is a medium nicely suited to understate-
ment. The romance and beauty of the exile motif in Zheng’s verse, for
example, is never without its melancholy edge, and this melancholia
had to have its source. In the poets’ views, exile in Taiwan in the
1950s was nothing to crow about. Thus, while the critics tend to
focus on the important formal innovations that Zheng’s lyrical style
has come to epitomize, it is not likely that his poetry could have
manifested itself without the unique set of historical circumstances in
which it did.
In the past twenty-five years, the conception of the lyric has under-
gone considerable scrutiny and reevaluation in contemporary
American, mainly poststructuralist, criticism. The lyric—given its
reliance on the performative capacity of language over and above, to
some extent, its referential capacity, its relative density and terseness,
and its invitation to close textual reading—has been one of the favorite
sons of Modernism and, by extension, of analysis informed by the
epistemological stance of New Criticism. The modern Western lyric
virtually dictates that one dissect it with careful attention to form and
formal considerations. In an article written in the 1980s surveying
poststructural methods of parsing the lyric, Jonathan Culler, at the
time something of a postmodern gadfly in U.S. academic circles, con-
tends that the modern lyric goes far beyond the bounds of its formal
density, threatening, in fact, to undo itself even as it is in the process of
constructing itself. The lure of the lyric to compel the reader into close
analysis is a sort of trap, for, as Culler states,
Our inclinations [are to] to use notions of unity and thematic coherence
to exclude possibilities that are manifestly awakened by the language
and that pose a problem. (Culler 1985: 54)34 Christopher Lupke