Formation Of Personality And Its Limits

Feng Zhi(1905-1993)’s Sonnets is praised as “Poems of Contemplation” because the lyric subject pay attention to life,universe and daily life in a "contemplative" attitude.Since Feng Zhi is an important Chinese translator of Rilke,and Feng Zhi’s articles on his literary creation analyze Rilke’s inspiration to him,current research focuses on the learning of Rilke in Sonnets.However,Feng Zhi’s learning of him shows a distinct selectivity.Besides,under the anti-war context,the personality transformation Rilke brought to him created a contradiction between maintaining individual independence and integrating into the collective.The contradiction Feng Zhi encountered made the personality of the lyric subject of Sonnets contradictory.It speaks with two tones,namely the “contemplative” one and the "expressing" one.Feng Zhi published two sonnet sequences before Sonnets(Mingri she,1942).The difference in their themes suggests the difference in the lyric subject’s tones in Sonnets.Besides,the poems in the appendix of the 1942 version of Sonnets are completely different from those in the 1949 version published by Wenhua Shenghuo Chubanshe,which shows the change of Feng Zhi’s literary idea in the 1940 s.Feng Zhi completely denied the literary value of Sonnets in the 1950 s.From the 1980 s to the 1990 s,he carefully compensated for the misjudgments he made then.The self-evaluations he made reflect not only the fluctuations of his judgment on Sonnets’ literary value,but also show how Feng Zhi views his value as an intellectual and an individual.They also raise the question which Feng Zhi began to think about in the 1940s: How does one deal with the relationship between the individual and the collective.In terms of poetry writing skills,Feng Zhi selectively learned from Rilke.Feng Zhi’s observations on the Eucalyptus and Edelweiss are different from Rilke’s observations on objects.He personifies the plants and at last praises the human character he admires.Feng Zhi learned the idea of "converting the invisible into the visible" from Rilke,but in his practice,he followed it by constraining the invisible.This reflects Feng Zhi’s preference for confine and rule.In terms of his attitude towards life,Feng Zhi,inspired by Rilke’s concept of "experience",began to empathize with the contemporaries and paid more attention to the war.In addition,through the interpretation of Rilke’s "work and wait",he proposed that one should try not to be distracted by the disturbances of the times and work hard.However,after taking the context of the Anti-Japanese War into consideration,this idea was interpreted as working hard and meeting the future needs of the society.Feng Zhi’s essays on the relationship between individuals and collectives,written in the first half of the 1940 s,presents Feng Zhi’s contradiction more clearly: his ideal lifestyle for individuals is to maintain the freedom of being different from the collective,while at the same time conscientiously integrate into it.The incompatibility of these two ideas provided Feng Zhi with a dilemma.Feng Zhi’s contradiction in the personality transformation caused the lack of unified personality in the lyric subject of Sonnets,which had a “contemplative” tone and an "expressing" tone.The former one is closely related to the wartime lifestyle.Feng Zhi fled from home and separated from his friends because of the war.The concomitant feelings of insecurity and sorrow were expressed through the lyric subject’s observation of universe and life.Feng Zhi took refuge in the farm hut and his range of movement was limited.The lyric subject expressed the feeling of being stranded through the forced and long-time watching of the everyday objects.The “expressing” tone contains two types: in the poems for people,the poet inside the text speaks one-to-one to the deceased,while outside the text,he tries to educate the reader by praising the deceased and criticizing the living;In poems that refer to the collective with “we”,the lyric subject takes the collective as the audience,and his gesture is to speak and appeal.The lyrical method of the poems for people and the appealing tone of the sonnets facing the collective directly led to Feng Zhi’s collective and enthusiastic poetic style in the 1950 s.