370 chapter eleven
Literature and Art,” or in 1949, when the Maoist view of literature be-
came government policy in the People’s Republic; it doesn’t stop even
in 1978, with the emergence of the avant-garde in the pages of Today.
Thus, Yu effectively lumps together poets from the Republican era,
state-sanctioned Maoist orthodoxy and the 1980s as obsolete, a pow-
erful rhetorical move that he repeats more or less explicitly in several
of his other essays.^10 Among his fellow 1980s poets he clearly targets
Obscure Poetry, but most of all authors associated with the Elevated
cult of the late 1980s, which was at a high point when he wrote the
essay.
Yu’s comments on the poet’s divine status are typical of his own
and Han Dong’s poetics, in that both distinguish implicitly between
an abstract, idealized concept of the poet on the one hand, and its
(in) au t hen tic manifestations on the other. According to Yu, inauthen-
tic poets “whose role is no longer that of God” lose the godlike status
they have arrogated to themselves; authentic poets of the new era,
including Yu Jian, don’t seek after such status to begin with.
A few years on, in “What Should the Poet Do?” (䆫ҎԩЎ, 1993),
Yu appears much less adverse to notions of the poet as god:^11
It looks as though in this world, the poet always plays the role of one of-
fering spiritual redemption. I certainly won’t deny that today, at a time
when the dominant discourse and the set of values it has constructed are
on the verge of collapse, there is a need for new gods to guide us...
Great, healthy poetry will guide us to escape from the spiritual hell of
utopianism, and to return in health and freedom to man’s “here and
now.”Utopianism is one of the attributes that constitute the Elevated aes-
thetic in the eyes of its critics, as discussed in chapter One.
In 1994, in an interview with Zhu Wen, Yu describes the mature
poet as one of divine vigor (干ᗻ༩༩), a rewriting of the expression
干䞛༩༩ ‘glowing with health and vigor.’^12 In “The Light of Poet-
ry, Cutting through the Chinese Language” (こ䍞∝䇁ⱘ䆫℠Пܝ,
1999) Yu calls poets divinities (干♉) and emissaries of the divine who
operate language. “The Light” was one of the key texts in the Popu-
(^10) Esp Yu Jian 1998a.
(^11) Dated 1993 and likely a journal publication around that time. Included in Yu
Jian 1997b: 235-238.
(^12) Yu Jian & Zhu 1994: 129.