"1917-1923" The Modern Poetry Studies,

The dissertation concludes that the New Poetry forms its own tradition gradually from its early days by studying the revolution of the new poetry from 1917 to 1923. There are qualitative differences between this new tradition and the old one, which results certain difficulties for the New Poetry to inherit the old tradition, therefore, we should be very cautious of the proposition that the New Poetry ought to return to the old tradition.The dissertation has six chapters: introduction; background knowledge; the revolution of poetic style: theory and reality; new poetry: the journey of searching for language; new and old traditions: several debates; conclusion.The introduction illustrates the research range of the dissertation, analytical perspectives and related documentations.The dissertation spreads by emphasizing the formation and development of the internal "problems" of the New Poetry instead of strict "history" narrating method. The dissertation employs two angles of view: the present one which looks back the past and the past one which oversees the present.Chapter One introduces the lived and living literature and the translating characteristics of modern classical Chinese writing, which are the two explicit backgrounds related to the revolution of the New Poetry. More important is that the solutions to these two problems will provide the necessary background support for analysis of the qualitative differences between the New Poetry and the classical one.Chapter Two concretely analyses the developing process of the revolution of the New Poetry. First, the lingual causes of the genesis of the revolution of the New Poetry are analyzed, then the concrete developing process. Two sample cases are used to inspect the richness of the developing process of the New Poetry revolution. The two sample cases are poems published on Novel Monthly and the translation and introduction of foreign poems during the period of the New Poetry revolution,Chapter Three states how the New Poetry found the proper poetic language for himself in the new lingual environment by analyzing the changes and characteristics of the several New Poetry types: lyrics, narrative poems and didactical poems etc. in order to reevaluate the features of the various types of the New Poetry during its initial stages in the specific historical situation, the language-searching perspective is more important than the simple "poetic" perspective.Chapter Four uses three debates to recognize the qualitative differences between the New Poetry and the Classical one. The three debates are: the modern translation of classical poetry, plagiarism, "the ugly words and sentences". It points out that the change of poetic language is the fundamental cause of the debates. The lingual change resulted in certain qualitative differences between the New Poetry and the classical one. The qualitative differences brought about huge difficulties for the New Poetry to inherit the tradition of the classical poetry.The conclusion summarizes the dissertation and introduces related problems.