A Research On Zhou Zuoren’s New Poems

Zhou Zuoren’s writing of new poems was just a small episode in his entire literary life, but actually reached a quite high achievement. His new poems have distinct aesthetic characteristics and get a unique position in all his poems.Zhou Zuoren created these poems in special background. On the one hand,The new poetry was newborn, although it was very popular then, some restricting factors also began to show themselves. On the other hand, Zhou Zuoren was keen on reforming the national characters by literature and active in construction of the new poetry, including writing preface for new poems, translating many foreign poems, writing criticism about new poetry and promoting the development of folk songs. Zhou Zuoren’s new poems played a guiding role among other new poets. In addition, Lu Xun helped Zhou Zuoren a lot in changing his new poems and had a considerable influence on him.Zhou Zuoren used many artistic sources for reference in his writing process. First of all, Zhou was influenced by ancient Greek poems, William Blake’s poems and the prose poems of Baudelaire. These influences embody in following aspects:in poetic forms, he insisted on "direct translation" when translating western poems, tried to keep the original style of the works and his own writing of new poems greatly absorbed the prosed feature in western poems; he translated a large number of love poems and advocated natural human desire which also appeared in his own works. Secondly, Zhou Zuoren translated many Japanese poems and showed great preference to them. The "substance sadness" in Japanese poems which attracted Zhou a lot actually accorded with his temperament and had a profound impact on Zhou’s new poems. Lastly, this paper analyzes the assimilation and abandon of ancient poems. He pointed out that poems should represent poet’s individual instead of imitating the dated patterns in ancient poems. In his own writing of new poems, Zhou didn’t intend to pursue the effect of music, gave up the poetic literal features and expressed himself by using fresh words.His new poems had distinct aesthetic characteristics which different from other authors. Firstly, his new poems combined beautiful form and deep thoughts very well. Secondly, his new poems got an exclusive aesthetic taste, these poems didn’t describe grand themes but paid great attention to the interest of the poems. At last, there was a emotion tension in his new poems which brought his new poems rich poetic flavor. This emotion tension came from his wandering between pubic concerning and his own spirit freedom.Zhou Zuoren wrote his new poems between1919and1923.He mainly wrote ancient poems before1919and wrote miscellaneous poems after1923. Zhou Zuoren was very conscious in selecting literary genre. He chose new poems instead of ancient poems to get rid of the stale lyric mode, then turned to miscellaneous poems for building his own literary world to alienate from the masses. His new poems got a unique position in all of his poems because they illustrated his effort in combining individual freedom and public concern, and were very precious as a trial to create a kind of literature which suited oneself and others.