442 chapter twelve
spective, the obstruction of one type of poetry or the occupation of the
scene by another were not merely detonators or catalysts, but among
the root causes of the conflict.
Throughout the Polemic the distinction between authors and texts
was blurred. Thus, the indictment of Cheng Guangwei’s selection of
authors in Portrait seamlessly led to the tendentious dichotomies that
we have reviewed, together creating an opposition of the Intellectual
and the Popular. This was put forward as representing an opposition
of two types of poetry. In itself, as I have argued throughout this study,
the avant-garde can perfectly well be viewed as a broad spectrum con-
tained within the outer limits of two divergent aesthetics, and textual
analysis and interpretation conducted within such a framework and
focused on typically Popular or Intellectual aesthetics yield equally di-
vergent poetics. But as observed above, aside from vague and unsub-
stantiated mutual accusations, the Polemic had little time for poetry
per se.
The genre of polemics has an inherent right to some unreason-
ableness. Still, this near-complete neglect of supposedly central sub-
ject matter is astonishing, all the more so because an opposition of
two types of poetry cannot even be maintained on the basis of the
explicit poetics found in the polemicists’ writings. On the contrary,
they display some notable similarities. Take, for example, Intellectual
Tang Xiaodu’s claim, in both the foreword and the postscript to his
yearbook (#19, 18), to occupying a Popular standpoint (⇥䯈ゟഎ).
These exact words are also the shortest, best-known summary of the
poetics proclaimed by Yu Jian in the introduction to Yang Ke’s first
yearbook, which reprints the phrase as an article of faith on one of the
inside cover pages (#14, 12), henceforth giving it the status of an anti-
Intellectual slogan. Or take Cheng Guangwei’s (#1) invocation of one
of his favorite poets, Xiao Kaiyu, as saying (p5):
Writing shouldn’t merely hinge on one’s social ambitions, but rather on
“material” from politics, economics, love and indeed current affairs and
everyday life, it should plant itself firmly in its cultural context.For all we know, this could be Yu Jian or Xie Youshun talking. Or
take discontent with the damage done to poetry by political ideology
and commercialization, regularly expressed by Intellectual and Popu-
lar voices alike, with a shared penchant for moralizing—and they were
no extras, either, but key players like Wang Jiaxin and Han Dong. A fi-