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The modern Chinese poet has appeared to be very fidgety. The question of "form" has been an eternal paradox. When the poet feels like a nightingale, he longs to get rid of any restraining patterns. But when he realizes that poetry, like painting, needs to be framed, his desire for acquiring such a frame is equally strong. So many poetical forms have been invented and tested, either by individuals or by groups of writers. So far, no conclusion of any kind has been reached.
Dr. Hu Shih may be called the first vernacular poet. His pioneer collection of verses was entitled "Experiments", which appeared early in 1920. The early poems were nearly all experimental. Often they were composed with the flimsiest feelings and appear uncouth in form. There was every attempt to democratize poetry but scarcely any to ennoble it. However, their merit lies not so much in versification as in their revolutionary audacity. Except for men of great genius, Chinese prosody had for centuries been a very rigid yoke. Its metrical rules had become mechanical and its images hackneyed. The Experimentalists emancipated Chinese poetry from the traditional bondage. But in doing so, they also eliminated the frontier between poetry and prose.
Another achievement of the Experimentalists was to broaden the range of poetical themes. In the past, Chinese poetry seemed to exist only to celebrate "the wind, the flowers, the snow and the moon". While this concentration on nature explains why many of our classical poets are still enjoyed to-day, even outside of China, it certainly did not suit the Republican Chinese, who wished literature to play its part in the social movement. There was also the strong desire to explore new pastures. With their prose-like poetry, they broke the traditional limitations of subject-matter, thus freeing future poets to write as the spirit moved them. A few poets addicted to notoriety filled their lines with political or erotic verbiage. But on the whole, nature's reflection on the human mind is still the favourite theme of Chinese poets.
This complete emancipation from form was soon found to be uncomfortable. Like a prima donna, poetry needed to be dressed, elegantly or magnificently. It began to feel ashamed of its nudity. A cloak was obviously in demand. Hsü Chih-mo, the leading poet of the Crescent Moon Society, and himself well read both in English and Chinese poetry, started the movement to restore musical qualities to verse. He made various bold attempts to introduce English metres into Chinese poetry, from Elizabethan sonnets to Byronic stanzas. Mr. Harold Acton, in his unique volume of Modern Chinese Poetry (Duckworth, London, 1936), wrote:
"When Hsü was consciously introducing the western rhapsody, he rushed to the antipodes of classical Chinese poetry, wallowing in overstatement and repetition and cumbering his lines with exuberant images which here and there ring false, here and there are exquisite. By exquisite we mean that they have that perfection of purely Chinese refinement which can only be communicated to foreigners by visual means, such as the finest examples of cut jade. Rhythmic vitality Hsü possessed; discipline, alas, he lacked."
The poets of the Crescent Moon Society, besides translating William Blake, Paul Valéry and other foreign masters, produced a number of original poets, such as Wen Yi-to, the author of Dead Water , Ch'en Mêng-chia and Pien Chih-lin. But the newly adapted frame became mechanical before it was well shaped. The symmetrical stanzas were sarcastically nicknamed "soya-bean-cake". The rigid sonnet seemed especially unpalatable to Chinese poets. So another mutiny began. This time, the impetus came from Walt Whitman and the French symbolists. Kuo Mo-jo, the leader of the Creation Society, revolted against it because his self-expression was strangled by such rigid forms. Instead of writing formal lines, weighing auditory and visual images of each word, he let his emotions pour forth in a passionate flood. For instance, he curses the modern metropolis thus:
"O pulse of the great city!
Throbs of life!
Beating, blowing and shouting,
Gushing, flying and jumping.
The horizon is veiled in mist!
My heart leaps out of my mouth!"
( Modern Chinese Poetry , p.87. )
The Creation Society first heralded romanticism, then socialism. In all activities, the versatile Kuo played the dominant part. During the romantic period", he assiduously translated the Rubá'iyát , Faust , and Shelley into verse. He wrote stories, plays, poems and literary criticism. The profuse passion in his poems did not please critics of the Anglo-American school, such as Professor Liang Shih-ch'iu who preferred restraint and decorum to inspiration. But that did not prevent Kuo from becoming popular. He was, in fact, regarded as a hero. What he revolted against was not only the rigidity of form imposed on free spirits. Like Lu Hsün, he revolted against the extravagant delicacy and dandyism of the Ivory Tower clique. But when the ivory was replaced by cheaper material, while remaining a tower, popular support was gradually withdrawn. However, I cannot help thinking that the "Poems for Recitation" which have become so popular a product of the Sino-Japanese war are a revival of Kuo's poems in the twenties.
Another group of rebels against "form" was of an aristocratic type. They seemed to hate form as much as lucidity. Li Chin-fa, a sculptor who had studied in Paris, was a fervent disciple of the French symbolists. With his magical fingers, he tried to chisel some verses. The result was that he created a new type of poem, filled with exotic images, remote metaphors, and frequent allusions to European mythology. Since the success of the vernacular, he was the first writer who did all he could to mingle the vernacular with the classical. In the long run, Li's influence was beneficial. He extended the vocabulary of the "plain language". But what struck his readers most was his images. Often they were sensual, as in his "Tenderness":
"With my presumptuous finger,
I feel the warmth of your skin.
The young deer went astray in the wood,
While only the scent of the dead leaves remains."
Sometimes his lines showed a great tendency to contemplation, tinged with morbidity. He was very fond of antiquity, unlike most of the early rebels. However, the antiquity that he buried himself in was more European than Chinese. In "Never to Return", he begins:
"Go o, my lad,
To the cities of yore
—They sleep in the night of centuries.
The streams sing monotonous songs,
Like the sighs of an Oriental poet.
Their hearts were like rocks, Thickly covered with moss..."
Though Li himself went back to sculpture, this type of poem continued to develop. Combined with the later influence of Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot, it flourished through the works of Tai Wang-shu, Pien Chih-lin and Ho Chi-fang. They maintained free verse as a form and the imagery of impressionism. The poetic content, however, became even more elusive. They are sometimes so suggestive that only readers capable of very far-reaching associative powers could read between the cryptic lines. Liu Hsi-wei, the impressionistic critic, made many successful adventures among the souls of contemporary authors. He tried, in his gaudy style, to interpret Pien's "Round Treasure Casket". Seizing the stanza:
"Never enter any watchmaker's shop,
To hear your youth nibbled away.
Never go to any antique shop,
To buy the trinkets of your grandpa..."
The adventurer imagined that the "treasure casket" symbolized the present, a bridge over the past and the future. When he reached the stanza:
"The moon has adorned your window,
And you somebody's dream,"
he concluded that the poet interpreted life as an embellishment. Poets usually are too aloof to speak to critics. But Pien could not contain himself. In an open letter to the sweating critic, he told him that he was "completely mistaken". The poet was thinking of relativity.
That Chinese readers complained of the growing ambiguity of the new poetry was only natural. Sometimes they blamed Mr. Paul Valéry, sometimes Mr. T. S. Eliot. The Japanese warplanes destroyed our people and buildings. They have also destroyed that ivory tower which the more privileged intellectuals in China had been building. In many ways, the aesthetes had helped to deepen the vernacular literature which was founded by people more socially than artistically conscious. The attempt to deepen it was natural and had been beneficial up to a point. But in view of the vast illiterate population, it was undoubtedly an oasis. The War has killed much literature for the introvert, but it has widened the horizon, and breathed vitality fresh from the good earth.