Zhu Xiang’s Exploration Of The Chinese New Poetry Form

Since the1970s, as the whole concept of literature renews in China, the literaryatmosphere become more active, and the successive re-organization and publicationof Zhu Xiang’s collection of poems, essays, translated poems and letters, Chinesescholars have laid more and more emphasis on the study of Zhu Xiang, and there is atendency of variety and originality respectively in their research methods andperspectives. However, generally speaking, scholars has paid most of their attentionto the beautiful and soft style of Zhu Xiang’s poems and the emotions inherent in hisworks, whereas they tend to neglect Zhu Xiang’s various bold literary experimentsand aesthetic pursuit in the field of poetry as a whole, which appears sparsely in thetreatises of analysts merely for the sake of proof.This thesis tends to thoroughly discuss Zhu Xiang’s theory on New Poems and hisbold literary experiment in the form of New Poems. The whole passage is composedof four chapters. The introduction is divided into two parts: The first part tends tosort out, according to the sequence of time, the study of Zhu Xiang from the1930s tothe present, and focus on the boom of the study of Zhu Xiang since the1970s tillnow. The second part, based on Zhu Xiang’s three main collections of poems,namely Xia Tian, Cao Mang Ji and Shi Men Ji, generalizes the main features andcontributions of Zhu Xiang’s creation of New Poems in different phases.The second chapter discusses the consistency between Zhu Xiang’s poeticsinherent in his works and the cultural context. This chapter is composed of threesections. The first section looks back at the social and cultural background of Chinain the1920s as a whole and the development history of new poems and dwells onZhu Xiang’s attitude and reflection on the predicament of New Poems at that time,such as didacticism and insipid, plain language. The second section points out thatZhu Xiang objects “didactic poems” by emphasizing on the form of New Poems.And at last, Zhu Xiang has taken a measure of “restoring ancient styles of poems andabsorbing Western styles in order to form the present style of New Poems.” ZhuXiang has his unique choice in either “restoring ancient styles” or “absorbing theWestern styles”. For instance, in the aspect of restoration, he has emphasized on theabsorption and reference of the essences of old prose, the songs of Chu and ancientfolk songs. The third section tries to clear the misunderstanding of Zhu’s poeticalcreation as “art for art’s sake”, and claims that his poems, guided by the ideology ofpatriotism, describes and expresses the eternally invariable human life based on hisobjective artistic view and attitude.The third chapter takes the texts of Zhu’s New Poems as the target of analysis anddiscusses his experiment, success and failure in the exploration of the rules andforms of New Poems. The first section discusses the “musical beauty” which isinherent in his poems. Zhu has especially laid emphasis on the musical feature of poetry. He has experimented in the aspects of syllable, four tones of level andoblique, repetitive techniques in his creation of New Poems. He has paid particularattention to the rhyme scheme of New Poems by experimenting various ancient andpresent methods of rhyme scheme from both China and abroad. Zhu is ratherparticular and picky on the usage of rhyme scheme in his New Poems, which oftencombines the rhyme and the expression of meaning. The second section discussesthe style of New Poems. Zhu has experimented and innovates the verse lines andcantos of New Poems, and meanwhile, he has also continually experimented variousWestern styles of poems which include sonnets, epopee, etc. The third sectiondiscusses the imageries in Zhu’s New Poems. Zhu Xiang has consciously pursuedthe creation of classical artistic conception in his New Poems. Although what he hascreated are New Poems, he has often tries to portray ancient people and events byflexibly re-organizing the verse lines of ancient poems and classical folktales. Theold men and females in his poems are characters endowed with oriental elegance;Furthermore, Zhu’s New Poems emphasize on the imaginative space existed amonghuman, ghost and god in Chinese traditional literature, which is totally different fromthe “earthly world” under the realistic concern of literature since the May4YouthDay.The Conclusion, by comparison between Zhu Xiang and Wen Yiduo, Xu Zhi Mo,two vanguards in the movement of New Poetry and reference to the history of thestudy of Zhu Xiang, summarizes the uniqueness and complexity in Zhu Xiang’screation of New Poems.