anticommunist propaganda or a Romanticism modelled on the works
of Xu Zhimo and others from the 1930s. Luo Fu, like many émigré
poets, while believing in the GMD cause, never really took poetry-as-
propaganda seriously; instead, he opted for Romanticism.
However, they soon found the romantic idiom inadequate for
expressing the anxieties they experienced living in uncertain times, cut
off from a sense of place and tradition. Modernism, a multifaceted
movement, emerged to fill the void. The movement grew out of the
émigré experience; the debates and theory that shaped the movement
were initiated and controlled by mainlanders.
The poets in the various camps—the Moderns, the Blue Stars, and
the Epoch poets—collectively termed Modernists, wrote out of their
own subjectivity, producing the period’s poetry of interiority and indi-
vidualistic styles. The physical and ideological realities of China had
been negated; and this attenuation of reality served to undermine their
sense of self. The fragmentation of China was embodied on an indi-
vidual level by many Modernist writers and internalized as the tissue
of experience. This sense of fragmentation eventually came to operate
as the organizing principle for Modernist works. With no consistent
worldview, their own fragmentary experience and an equally eclectic
blend of ideas drawn from the West formed the basis for an aesthetic
that explained their own life situation.
Modernism quickly became the dominant form of poetic discourse
on the island, eclipsing anticommunist propaganda and Romanticism.
The Modernists were primarily concerned with the primacy of art and
eschewed political engagement. Thus they never met government
opposition as did the social-realists and nativists poets. For nearly two
decades, from the 1950s through the 1970s, the movement’s authority
was unchallenged. But in the early 1970s, a new generation of poets
emerged. Stung by Taiwan’s declining political fortunes in the West,
they rejected Modernism and all elitism in art, advocating a new real-
ism. Facing such popular opposition, Modernism went into decline.
Luo Fu gradually abandoned his avant-garde position for writing
increasingly steeped in tradition.
Death of a Stone Cellcan be described as a vast canvas upon which
the great themes of life, death, love, and war are painted. Luo Fu
described the poem as “a portrait of man’s uncertainty and anxiety in
modern life; a lonely outcry wrung from between life and death, love
and hate, gain and loss” (Luo 1974: 3). (The stone cell forms a symbol
of modern man’s alienated condition or his existence in a man-made
reality that does not correspond to the intentions of his activities or
dreams.) Luo Fu’s reflections on the nature of human existence and
68 John Balcom