An Introduction To Artistic Features Of Bian Zhi-lin's Early Poems

As one of the latter representatives of Chinese Modernist poets, Bian Zhi-lin plays a transitional role in the development of Chinese Modernist poems. Of his poems, "intellectual" is the major characteristic, which not only means that deep philosophical thoughts are conveyed through his life experience and personal emotion displayed in the poems, but also means the way of embodying the poet's personal thoughts. As a result, this individual model of thinking enables his poems both far away and close to the readers, since it balances between "displaying himself and "hiding himself, thus expresses modern people's emotion through Modernist poems marked with classical flavor.Bian's way of modernizing his poems is to make them more like a prose, which changes the structure of poems in the origin. Modern Chinese is characteristic of loose, free and common style, preventing the poet from constructing a poem confirming to classical rhyme and rhythm, but only to write down some language like prose. The effect of this is loose sentence structures in form and a combination of poem and prose in content.Intellectual images and dramatized poems are his usual "impersonalized" methods, tracing life concisely in the micro scenes outlined by specific images, through which express his own understanding of human life. Objective, but concise emotion and the existence of hidden subjects enrich the structure of his poems, thus they are open to multiple interpretations.Of all the Chinese Modernist School of poets in 1930s, Bian Zhi-lin is quite special in his highly philosophical understanding of human life, individual style mixed with classical and European flavor, as well as extraordinary intelligence, and all of these have a great influence on Chinese Modernist poems.