The Echoes Across Time

As a great democratic poet and the father of free verse in the United States, Whitman causes a lasting impact to Chinese Poets since the May 4th Movement. Gu Cheng, a representative of the Obscure Poets, has been praised as "probably the best Chinese poet in the 20th century" by German Sinologist Kubin. Whitman is Gu Cheng’s favorite foreign poet. In many interviews and speeches, Gu Cheng shows his appreciation of Whitman and admits Whitman’s influence on his poetry. What’s more, he also continuously evaluates Whitman’s poem throughout his life. This thesis, employing the theory of the influence study and the parallel comparative literature theme study, tries to find the convergence in Gu Cheng and Whitman’s poetry. With Gu Cheng’s Empirical texts and materials, the thesis places their poetry in the context of the comparative literature to refine the research of Whitman’s impact study.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is prolegomenon. It states the significance of the study and the research status of Gu Cheng and Whitman. The second section first overviews the translations and the influence of Whitman and his Leaves of Grass in China. Secondly, based on the text of Gu Cheng, the thesis discusses the "coincidence" between Gu Cheng and Whitman and sketches out the impact of Whitman. Parts three through five focus on the convergence of the two poets, which bases on their philosophic concept, poetry subject and literary techniques. Ideally, the two poets have similar ideas about philosophy, nature and life-death. Besides, although they are not contemporaries, there are some similarities between their times. All this caused the convergence in their poetry subject of self-expression, eulogizes civilians and the pursuit of light. And finally discusses the similarities in artistic technique, poetry language and symbolic way of the two poets.As mentioned above, with analysis of the text and poetry, the thesis analyzes the convergence between Gu Cheng and Whitman, and summarizes Gu Cheng’s change and standard about Whitman.