To Find A New Anchorage

The 1990s' witnessed a sharp contrast to the preceding decade in China' s poetry aesthetic trend. The aesthetic ideals that had covered the poetic circles in the 1980s' , including reason, enlightenment, liberation of subject and pray for freedom, and the concurrent fight against ideology have been deserted, weakened or forgotten gradually. It no more holds high a banner, but never gives up the contend for utterance' s right; it no more advocates the group, yet not forgets the maintenance of regional and group interests; it no more extols great feats or lofty causes, but indulge in the seizing of day-to-day aesthetics; and it no more tries to construct anything, but overturn and satirize the established system and order in sedulous destruction. Calm and sensible narration replaces the exalted lyrics; a bantering style rewrites the eulogy of history and grand events. While the poets are epoch-fringed, they help intensify the fringing of themselves simultaneously. The cloud of smoke that is triggered by "the intelligentsia writing" and "the folk writing" gives us the sober-headed consciousness of a distinct split among poet groups. This is a time-honored divergence. It is not only a question of poetic ideal; and moreover, the most deeply-implied cause is an enormous difference in their spirit of poetic aesthetics and the values of secular concern. What the "intelligentsia writing" carries forward is the Modernistic spirits of "misty poetry" group, that is, order, responsibility, reason and undertaking; while "the folk writing" succeeds to the post-Modernism philosophic theory of "the post-misty poetry" group, including anti-culture, anti-loftiness, removal of meaning and withdrawal of center. Their co-existence rightly illustrates that, the contemporary intelligentsia in China, especially humanistic intelligentsia are faced with a mutiny in the surface of ideology and an out-of-balance among concepts of value. It is an ambiguous age when the people discover that things cannot be nominated by means of the universal affirmation of "either this or that" to which we have been accustomed. At such an epoch, what I put into this paper is to work for a solution of such questions as "What a poet can do?" and "What the intelligentsia can do?...