Romantic To Classic: Hsu Chih-mo Aesthetic Ideas Of Transmutation

Xu Zhimo, a noted poet and prose writer in modern literature era of China. His aesthetic thoughts experienced a gigantic transformation from Romanticism to Classicalism. In the early stage of his literature career, the romanticism style was so overwhelming expressed both in his poems and prose. Since the middle period of his creation, he became a pious follower of Classicalism in aesthetics. The present paper focuses on the external and internal reasons that such a devoted romantic poet unbelievably discarded his previous belief through anglicizing his different aesthetics thoughts in different period, and explores the influence of the transformation. In the paper, the concept"romantic"refers to the style of Xu's poems and prose, in which he pursues the romantic delight, humanity and beauty in his romantic and special way. While the concept"classical"in this paper not only refers to the formula and rules of Classicalism, and the school which was started by Irving Babbitt, Arnold in the early 20th, but also suggests to confront both the crack of Time and the evil of modern civilization with the tradition awareness. The feature of inseparable connection with tradition and culture aroused a sympathetic response on Xu Zhimo, as the classical spirit did exist in his mental world. The very aesthetic principle successfully transformed Xu's aesthetic thoughts.There are all together 4 parts in the paper.The job of the first section is to summarize the three characteristics of Xu's Romanticism aesthetics, which including: delight, humanity and beauty from 1922 to1925. And also, these features were following him in rest of his literature career.The second section is supposed to discuss the procedure that how the classical spirit deeply rooted in Xu Zhimo's mental world: in early stage, that spirit stayed in his subconscious pressed by his romantic spirit, and then after, the classical spirit became the dominant thoughts with the feature: Health and Dignity,but the romantic thoughts did not being totally kept from his literary creation.The following section's task is to settle the problem why such a romantic poet would restrain his nature and walked into the palace of Classicalism. The reason including his family origin, his education background; the tendency of Romanticism's development; the decree of New Humanism has something in common with Chinese traditional culture, especially the Confucian school as they all concentrated on the doctrine of the mean and harmony in life and society, and were responsible as a scholar in the hard time of our nation .Finally, in the last part , the writer manages to illustrate clearly the effect of the transformation of Xu Zhimo's aesthetics thoughts and the effect that Crescent School's propagating Classicalism thoughts in Chinese modern literature history. Under the characteristic of ration and temperance, the Crescent School molded its'own literary quality and restrained both in the radical, extreme tendency and ideology's prevailing, the aesthetic thoughts also created a comparatively integrated history of literary ideological trend.