Poetry Mudan: Rethinking The Influence of The Text
Zhuang Weijie
How to understand, approach and interpret the poet Mudan through his poetic texts may be the most ideal and effective way. Due to various objective or subjective conditions, carefully taking stock, if compared with the poets of his predecessors or contemporaries, the number of Mudan's works is not the largest, and he published only three poems during his lifetime: "Expedition", "Mudan Poetry Collection (1939-1945)" and "Qi"; the same is true from the personal anthologies and complete collections that have been published since his death. From the perspective of genesis, the period of southwest United Congress in the 1930s should belong to Mudan's writing adolescence, or romantic period. During this period, Mu Dan was enveloped and influenced by the huge poetic style of the English Romantic poets, his concern for the suffering of reality, the exploration of the mysteries of life in the universe, with a strong sense of life and modern skepticism, which was also reflected in the creation of the temperament and number of romantic poetry, that is, he wrote "Shelley-style romantic poetry, with a strong lyrical temperament, but also venting dissatisfaction with reality." At that time, Mudan's poems such as "The Beast", "In the Wilderness", and "The Garden" were mostly based on romantic lyricism, with wild shouts, symbolic semantics, and amazing self-dissection. However, the relationship between Mudan and reality at that time, like the tension between his poems, was more urgent and anxious in the upward trend of the creative mentality. "I cried out from the wilderness of my heart, / for the beautiful truthSpring I glimpsed, / and the unfortunate, wandering days will no longer be, / When I hang my wrong childhood." ("In the Wilderness") This simple expression with emotional ups and downs has not really branded the poet's personality in the strict sense, but hovers between modern and avant-garde, or romantic and modern.
Entering the 1940s, after some polishing and contemplation, from self-monologue to conscious introspection, the poet was driven to quickly change the style of poetry. Since then, Mu Dan began to roll forward on the chariot of the pioneers, and ushered in the golden period of poetry creation: while consciously expanding the modernity of new poetry with his colleagues in the Jiuye Poetry School and launching a bold exploration in poetic art, that is, using "modern techniques" to grasp and deal with "modern experience". On the one hand, the brushstrokes are extended to a more open space, specifically, it is the poetic proposition and common pursuit of "the fusion of sensibility and intellect" and "dramatization of new poetry" manifested by the Jiuye poetry school; it has both a sober and rational spirit of self-dissection, and can return to the actual existence, pay attention to the human condition, pay attention to the individual survival situation, or reflect on the national destiny, culture, and human nature from the perspective of history, which is the basic writing ethics and spiritual dimension of Mudan's poetry in this period. And as a unique individual to show their own personality.
For Mudan, this period was his ability to consciously move from the passion of romanticism to the intellectual and contemplative nature of modernism. Although Romantic poetry once liberated or enriched its lyrical form, it did not provide substantial enlightenment about the poet's relationship with reality. Mu Dan's poetic journey then boldly and intensively absorbs the strengths of Western modernity, on the one hand, profoundly expressing the unique emotional experience and intellectual thinking of modern people; on the other hand, taking the concept as the starting point, capturing images and details through artistic imagination, launching a new round of writing, and successively contributing some poems with advanced consciousness and considerable weight to the poetry world, such as "Departure", "I", "Praise", "Eight Poems", "In the Cold Moon Night", "Spring", "Chorus" and other important texts.
Written in November 1940, the poem "I", writing a self-image locked in the "wilderness", is obviously influenced by Eliot's famous work "Wasteland", the poet wants to find his own authenticity, eager to break out of the fence of reality, but everything is not as imagined, reality often repays the poet's pursuit with pain and disappointment. "Cut from the womb, lost warmth, / is the cruel part longing for rescue, / always be himself, locked in the wilderness." This pain or loneliness of the individual's soul being torn apart seems to plunge the poet into a state of existential dilemma and uncertainty. Thus, "in every moment of collapse, I see a hostile me" ("Thirty Birthdays Have Feelings"). In the face of the cruel reality, Mu Dan did not overly indulge in the fantasy, but extended his brushstrokes beyond the self to a deeper perception of national suffering. He discovered that a nation had risen with "Praise", and he used "Departure" to experience the spiritual pain and rich pain of the individual in history. When he is in "In the Night of the Cold Waxing Moon", he presents the vast and melancholy scenery of the northern wilderness with cold brush and ink: "In the cold night of the waxing moon, the wind sweeps the plains of the north, / The fields in the north are dry, and the barley and millet have advanced into the villages." "When silent snowflakes fall on the old sickles, hoes, oxbows, stone mills and carts at the door, we hear the poet's concern for the reality of China and the anxiety of the fate of the nation intertwined, and a deep sense of distress overflows from the words.
It can be said that through the through-the-interplay of various poetic texts, MuDan has formed a mutual criticism and made his own voice, especially the "Eight Poems", which is recognized as Mudan's masterpiece, the contradiction and affinity of three forces are enough to appreciate the complex thinking, linear emotions and rich structure in his poems. Zheng Min said: "The influence left on me by this group of poems is no longer the exquisiteness of the branches, but its philosophical height, the connection between personal love experience and the operation of the universe, this level cannot be obtained purely from the analysis of the tangible structure, and only when I return to the height of 'God' (or trace) can I enter this layer of appreciation and understanding, which is a layer of essential and invisible highest structure." For this reason, Mu Dan is recognized as the "standard-bearer of the Jiuye poetry school", representing the exploration of modernity of the Jiuye poetry school and the depth and breadth that Chinese modernist poetry may have reached in the 1940s.
It is true that Mu Dan's dedication to driving the new Chinese modernist poetry to gain a foothold in the new Chinese literature is not an easy task to become a poetic way that can stand side by side with realist and romantic poetry. The three collections of poems he published and the peak period of creation coincided with the two historical stages of China's National War of Resistance and the Liberation War for People's Democracy, when the creation of accomplished poets such as Ai Qing, Feng Zhi, and Bian Zhilin was in a leading position. As the main general of the Nine Leaf Poetry School, the young Mu Dan wanted to make a difference in poetry writing, and it was bound to make an artistic "breakthrough", but he could not act blindly. Thus he strenuously opposed the enthusiastic and pompous poetry that "has no basis in the depths of reason", and fully affirmed that Ai Qing's "Trumpeter" is "a bodybuilding combination of emotion and imagery".
In March and April 1940, he published two important poems in succession in the Ta Kung Pao Synthesis (Hong Kong Edition): "He Died for the Second Time" and "The Collection of Letters of Consolation—Starting from the Fish Eye Collection". The text particularly emphasizes the "locality" of Ai Qing's poetic works that are deeply connected to the Chinese land. At the same time, it is emphasized that Bian Zhilin's poetry replaces the "old lyricism" of "natural scenery and pastoral mood", which is a "new lyricism" that "rationally encourages people to strive for various", that is, to enhance the intellectual component of poetry. What Mu Dan pondered was the reality that China had begun to emerge as a result of the War of Resistance, "Which direction should our poetry be taken?" This question was later responded to by the poet Xu Chi— a "lyrical banishment." And this is precisely the "only way that new poetry can rely on." The goal of this path is to create modern Chinese poetry.
Therefore, what interests the author is that why Mu Dan has once again attracted widespread attention and high praise is related to a series of important events such as his own poetry writing and the "rewriting of literary history" triggered by his academic community, but this is not entirely due to his personal factors, but also the result of the "natural selection" of him by the Chinese academic and cultural ecology after the 1990s. If We place Mu Dan in the spiritual genealogy of 20th-century Chinese literature, it can be seen that he did not fall from the sky, and at least two types of cultural people (writers and scholars) can be compared with each other. One is that after the re-discovery of literary research circles, such as Lin Yutang and Zhang Ailing, they re-enter the writing of literary history, or thus become the evolution of commercial society to borrow classic discourse in the consumption of the masses; the other is that hot figures such as Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun are painted as imaginative pictures of "intellectual elites" as cultural idols. For Mudan, he seems to have both types of elements, because he has multiple identities, being both a poet and translator, a professor, and a scholar.
Although the reasons for Lin Yutang, Zhang Ailingre and Chen Yinkege are not the same, the inner rational road is similar, it is a construction and borrowing of cultural symbols, which together constitute a mottled and meaningful cultural landscape Chinese mainland the 90s. Mu Dan's representative poems written in different periods before and after, such as "Walking on the Field", "Crack", "The Besieged", "Looming", "Indictment", "The Charm of the Forest - Sacrifice of White Bones on the Hukang River", "Looming", "Winter", have attracted widespread attention. If the early Mudan poetry was full of rich pain and the strange vitality of hope in "despair"; then in the late 70s, even if the personal dilemma was encountered and the tone of writing was pessimistic, there was a kind of "tragic sublime beauty", which pointed to the tragic existence of people. "Winter", which can be called the poet's "pressed volume", is quite obvious, which is enough to represent Mu Dan's achievements in his later years, and can be regarded as a heavy memory and a spiritual mirror in the history of new poetry in the past century. Perhaps this is a special spiritual archive left by MuDan for a hundred years of new poetry and new Chinese literature in the era of poverty with lack of poetry.
So far, although the study of Mudan has been fully developed, with multi-angle in-depth research, more consensus, but also showing a variety of characteristics, these research results are reflected in the various modern literary history textbooks that have been published, but it is not as thorough as people think, and there is still a huge space for excavation. It can be seen that most of the critical articles are only interested in what Mudan's poetic world has written, symbolized, and criticized, or because of the bias of research, most of them focus on establishing the historical status of poetry (literature) for him, as well as the careful reading of his poetic texts, etc., but often ignore what kind of thinking the poet has experienced in his heart in the long silence between works and works; and even ignores the completely different situations of the poet before and after the period, creating how to switch and generate between his different poetic styles; in addition, The background of Mu Dan's time and some hidden things behind it, such as his poetry and war, the relationship with the nation and society, especially Mu Dan's breaking of the inherent creative precepts for himself in the late life, etc., as well as his thinking and interaction with his art of translation and the cultural exchange between China and the West derived from it, seems to have not attracted enough attention. In fact, these topics also have deep value, and need to be explored and explored more deeply by the poetry community and academia.
About the Author
Zhuang Weijie, a native of Minnan, lives in Australia, writes poetry and reviews, doctor of literature, postdoctoral fellow at Fudan University. He is currently the chief editor of the journal of Chinese and the resident expert of the Center for Advanced Study of Poetics of Shandong University. Vice Chairman of the Chinese and Foreign Prose and Poetry Society. He has won many literary and art awards such as the 13th "Bingxin Award" Theoretical Contribution Award and the 3rd Chinese Contemporary Poetry Criticism Award, and his works, papers and calligraphy have been selected into more than 300 important editions or annual anthologies, and he has published 20 monographs, edited more than 70 kinds of works, and published more than 400 academic papers and literary and art reviews.