Although an influential editor and literary historian, Ya Xian’s
greatest influence has been through his poetry. This may seem surpris-
ing given the shortness of his career, which lasted only eleven years.
Yet between 1954 and 1965, he produced some ninety works. His
output reached a peak in the years 1957 and 1958 when he completed
and published twenty-nine and nineteen poems respectively. While not
as prolific as many of his peers, he developed a unique structure and
style that has set his poems apart from those of his contemporaries,
influenced several generations of younger poets from throughout the
Sinophone world, and made him one of the most frequently antholo-
gized Chinese poets alive today. Written almost exclusively in free
verse, Ya Xian’s poems range in length from two lines (“Sunning
Books” >?, found in his “Collection of Short Songs” @AB,
written in 1957) to his ninety-eight-line masterpiece “The Abyss”
CD, completed near the height of his career in 1959.
Ya Xian draws upon a wide variety of images from history, nature,
literature, and modern life to construct his verse. Inspired by surreal-
ism, he frequently juxtaposes disparate images: the Asian and the
Western, the ancient and the modern, as well as the timeless and sig-
nificant against the quotidian and the meaningless, leaving the reader
to draw connections between ideas and conclusions as to his meaning.
He is well-read in Chinese and Western literature and has read and
been influenced by He Qifang E其G(1912–1977), Dai Wangshu,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, W. H. Auden, Emile Verharen,
and Charles Baudelaire.
Though his poems vary considerably in theme, Ya Xian has written
most often about the search for meaning in a modern world. His
oeuvre encompasses not only reminiscences from youth and occa-
sional poetry, but also carefully wrought portraits of people—real and
fictional—which he grouped in his collected works under the heading
“Profiles” 側面(see Ya 1981b: 4–5). Another cycle of poems entitled
the “Broken Pillars Collection” JKBoffers glimpses of great cul-
tures and their cities both ancient (Babylonia, Arabia, Greece, Rome,
and Jerusalem) and modern (Paris, London, and Chicago) with a
trajectory leading toward modernizing and industrializing societies as
described in the poem “Chicago” LMN. They embrace what may be
the most common theme in all of Ya Xian’s work: assessing the costs
that progress and industrialization have wrought. To this end, Ya
turns repeatedly to religion and existentialism, often pitting the latter
against the former. The poet headed his longest poem, “The Abyss,”
with a quotation from Jean Paul Sartre that reads, “I want to exist—
this and nothing more. Yet at the same time I have also discovered its
50 Steven L. Riep