Chapter Five
To the Heart of Exile:
The Poetic Odyssey of Luo Fu
John Balcom
Luo Fu (Lo Fu)is the penname of Mo Luofu , born in
Hunan Province in 1928. He started writing poetry in mainland China
in the mid-1940s. He joined the military during the war and was part
of the Guomindang (GMD) exodus to Taiwan in 1949, a move that
would have a profound impact on his life and writing. He cofounded
the Epoch Poetry Society 創 with Zhang Mo (b. 1931)
and Ya Xian 瘂 (b. 1932) in 1954 and served as editor of the asso-
ciation’s Epoch Poetry Quarterly 創 for more than a decade. A
controversial figure in many literary debates that shaped the evolution
of modern Chinese poetry, immensely influential in Taiwan and
China, Luo is the author of twelve volumes of poetry; an equal
number of personal anthologies published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
mainland China; five collections of essays; five volumes of literary
criticism; and eight book-length translations.
Luo Fu’s ability to remake himself and his poetry over the years has
earned him the nickname of Poet-Magus. In reading Luo Fu’s oeuvre,
what emerges in retrospect is a kind of Chinese literary odyssey—a
mythic journey through time over which the history of modern China
and Taiwan stands as a guiding presence. The shadow of China’s and
Taiwan’s recent history establishes the broader ethos within which the
quest is enacted. The progression of the quest can be divided into sev-
eral stages that are manifest in the stylistic developments in his work
where change finds itself inscribed in literary form. His writing is
always on the pulse of the times, articulating the tragedy of the twen-
tieth century. Throughout his career, Luo Fu has engaged the nature of
the self and expressed its troubled relationship with the Chinese
milieu. This engagement has been a search for the self and China, and
what it means to be Chinese; but as counterpoint to this, Luo Fu has
sought freedom, an ontological freedom from historicity.