immaterial shadow. Material restrictions gone, the chimney is a
shadow of itself but remains equally unfree. The shadow is ultimately
determined by the interaction or synthesis of the spiritual (sunlight)
and the material (chimney). The poet seems to imply that it is in the
pursuit of the ideal that man can change himself and his surroundings,
his fate, and history. Though complete freedom from the contingencies
of a painful reality may elude the personae of Luo Fu’s lyric poems,
they can find its temporary approximation in love. Love is an ideal
that enables man to transcend the limitations placed on him by cir-
cumstance. Lover and beloved in Luo Fu’s early lyric poems enter their
own private world, providing release from the world, even if only
temporarily.
Yet Luo Fu, like many other poets in Taiwan in the 1950s and
1960s, was growing dissatisfied with such poetry, finding that it was
inadequate to capture the times in which he lived. Something new was
needed. His first major creative breakthrough as a poet came in 1958
when he was stationed on Quemoy during the PRC bombardment of
the island. One day, as the shells rained down overhead, he began
writing inside a bomb shelter. The work would grow into a sequence
of sixty-four poems that took five years to complete. The sequence
was published in 1965 as his second book of poetry titled Death of a
Stone Cellmnopq. The sequence is one of the most representative
works of high Modernist poetry written in Taiwan during the 1960s.
Along with nearly two million people in 1949, Luo Fu fled a
country devastated by years of war for an island province with an
unsure future. To ensure political control over the island, the GMD
government had earlier declared martial law and suspended the con-
stitution. In the early 1950s, the government also began to crackdown
on local intellectuals with leftist views, executing and imprisoning
many during the White Terror. Seen more as rulers from outside than
as compatriots, the mainland émigrés found themselves to be strangers
in a strange land. The government also insisted that their sojourn on
the island was temporary. Together, these factors gave rise to an
“exile” mentality, an intense feeling of rootlessness and alienation,
which would have a profound impact on literature in Taiwan.
The direction literature was to take in Taiwan was also determined
in large part by government policy. To maintain ideological hegemony,
the government proscribed most modern Chinese literature and the
use of Japanese, which had been in use on the island for fifty years.
This policy effectively eliminated the social-realist and nativist
traditions in modern literature, silenced most of the local poets who
could write only in Japanese, and reduced the aesthetic options to
The Poetic Odyssey of Luo Fu 67