thanatography and the poetic voice 101Luo Yihe, and to early essays by critics and fellow poets such as Li Chao,
Zhu Dake, Xiao Ying and Chen Dongdong. Chen writes:^10
When the one strangled his own song, the other could listen no more;
when the one’s outstanding voice fell silent, the clamor and the screams
destroyed the other’s ears.In view of Luo’s personally and poetically intimate relationship with
Haizi, it is but a small step from suicide by association to a vision, if
only implied, of Luo Yihe having sacrificed himself: for Haizi, or for
poetry, as Luo himself maintained that Haizi did. Commentators’ fac-
tually inaccurate inclusion of Luo Yihe in a list of contemporary poet-
suicides has trickled down into literary historiography, foreign and
domestic. In a 1999 essay on Mao Dun and Gu Cheng, Raoul Find-
eisen mentions Luo Yihe, Haizi and Ge Mai as poets “who died early
and by suicide,” and Chang Li and Lu Shourong’s China’s New Poetry
(Ёᮄ䆫, 2002) names Luo Yihe and Ge Mai as “two outstanding
poets [who] offered their young lives as tribute, just like Haizi.”^11
In addition to the huge exposure that Haizi’s hitherto largely un-
published poetry received in his own books, a posthumous explosion
of publicity is visible in the many commentaries on his life and work
since his death. Countless journal articles aside, Haizi receives special
attention in surveys, histories and genealogies of contemporary po-
etry. He was, for instance, the third individual poet to have a series
of articles devoted to him in the scholarly Poetry Exploration (䆫㋶)
after its revival in 1994, in what would grow into one of the journal’s
regular features. The first two were Gu Cheng and Shizhi. A romantic
vision of poethood is in evidence yet again: Gu Cheng and Haizi killed
themselves, and Shizhi—still known to many as Guo Lusheng—has
famously suffered from mental illness ever since the Cultural Revolu-
tion, when he wrote the poetry that has brought him so much renown.
It is no coincidence that these three names also represent the avant-
garde in the Selected Poetry by Famous Contemporary Chinese Poets series
mentioned above—in addition to Shu Ting, whose work has enjoyed
uncontroversially canonical status ever since Today. As for literary his-
tories, a telling source is Hong Zicheng’s Research on 20th-Century Chinese
Literature: The Contemporary Era (20Ϫ㑾Ё᭛ᄺⷨお: ᔧҷ᭛ᄺⷨお,
(^10) Haizi 1997, Gu Cheng 1995, Luo Yihe 1997b, Ge 1999; Li Chao 1999: 60-61,
Zhu Dake 1999: 141, Xiao Ying 1999: 231, Chen Dongdong 1991: 339.
(^11) Findeisen 1999: 167, Chang & Lu 2002: 232.