It's an old dream, The world in front of us is too complicated, I want to fly with the bird attached Go and talk to the quiet stars. - The Eighteenth of the Fourteen Elements (excerpt)
One afternoon in the winter of 1941, Feng Zhi, who was almost confused, wandered along the path of Kunming Mountain City. At that time, he had finished singing the song of yesterday, and he had also bid farewell to the years of the northern journey, and the lyrical poetry pen had been shelved above the table for more than ten years. When he looked up at several silver planes flying in the sky, he suddenly remembered the dreams of the ancients, so with the rhythm of his footsteps, he said a few rhyming poems, and went home to write them on the paper, which was a variant of the sonnet.
Although this poem was later ranked as the eighth poem of the Fourteen Elements, it was undoubtedly the first light that guided Feng Zhi to the peak of his poetry creation. The "Fourteen Elements" is a miracle in the history of modern Chinese poetry, but this miracle has forever fallen on the mountain city path that was lightly stepped on by the footsteps of poets in the 1940s. Later, whether it was singing praises for socialism in the western suburbs in the 1950s or meditating on the past in the 1980s, the "Fourteen Elements" became another lofty "dream of the old days" for Feng Zhi.
In the preface to the Second Collection of Novels compiled for the New Chinese Literature Series, Lu Xun called Feng Zhi "China's most outstanding lyric poet."
This evaluation can be described as extremely high, especially from the mouth of a literary giant like Lu Xun, and its weight is also extremely heavy, and even all modern literary histories today must quote this phrase when discussing Feng Zhi. However, it is interesting that the "Fourteen Elements" that really established Feng Zhi's status as a master was not yet published at that time, and what is more interesting is that Feng Zhi in the "Fourteen Elements" is no longer the lyric poet of the old days.
We don't know whether an unhappy childhood creates a sensitive poet, or whether a sensitive poet always encounters an unhappy childhood.
In short, the muse always seemed to be surrounded by a swamp of misfortune, and those who approached her never had a smile on their faces. There is no end to the nest, and under the decadent national situation is the decline of traditional families. Like Lu Xun, Feng Zhi also came from a large family that fell in the middle of the family. His father was a scholar by nature, and he never competed with his clan for family property, but only supported his family by doing some literary work in the organ or school.
In the late Qing Dynasty, women strictly adhered to the tradition of "husband and son", and most of the responsibility for taking care of their children still fell to Feng Zhi's mother. Feng Zhi's mother was tough by nature, and despite the family's financial difficulties, she insisted on sending Feng Zhi to primary school, sewing school bags for him by hand and Zhang Luo's writing utensils. Unfortunately, she was unfortunate to suffer from lung disease, and after giving her all the maternal love she could give, she finally gave up when Feng Zhi was nine years old. Although there was another stepmother who loved him, this stepmother died of illness when Feng Zhi graduated from high school.
Part of feng Zhi's vulnerability and sensitivity in his youth came from the two departures of his birth mother and stepmother. In a poem called "The Last Song" in his poetry collection "The Song of Yesterday", he wrote deeply, "The mother left her song / truly in the heart of her son". At the same time, the memory and attachment to his mother and the lack of reality expanded like a circle in Feng Zhi's heart as a circle of ripples into a hazy fantasy of the opposite sex - this fantasy mixed with the sincerity of family affection and the fierceness of love.
Portrait of Feng Zhi
The earliest poetic enlightenment that Feng Zhi received came from the correspondence collection of Guo Moruo, Zong Baihua, and Tian Han, the Three Leaves Collection.
Guo Moruo once said: "Poetry is not 'made', poetry is written." That is to say, poetry is not written in an allegory manner, but a natural capture of its own emotions, a kind of self-expression. After that, Guo Moruo's "Goddess" shocked Feng Zhi even more strongly, making him feel the dazzling explosive power of "self-expression". In the end, the theory of "Three Leaves", the practice of "Goddess", and the sensitive mentality worked together to push Feng Zhi in the 20s into the camp of Romanticism.
Although Feng Zhi was enlightened by Guo Moruo's poetry, this did not mean that he followed the path that Guo Moruo had walked. If this is the case, it should be Guo Moruo, not Feng Zhi, who will become China's most outstanding lyric poet.
Feng Zhi is sensitive in his heart, but he is also a little timid, which makes it impossible for his poetry to be as popular as Guo Moruo, and his poetry still has a subtle factor. In addition, the classical poems he recited in his early years also escaped into his pen from time to time, so that in addition to the inner emotional rhythm advocated by Guo Moruo, his poems also had the rhythmic beauty of the syllables of classical poetry.
Lu Xun once published several new poems in "New Youth" because "the poetry world was lonely at that time, so he beat the side drum and wrote lively", and since then he has "gone up to the small building alone to become unified" and still made old style poems. However, he often followed the development of poetry.
In the article "The Enemy of Poetry", he believes that "poetry is originally intended to express its own enthusiasm, and it is time to stop", and lyricism ranks first in poetry. In 1919, he criticized the poetry world for "writing more narratives and less lyricism"; but after the rise of Guo Moruo's group of romantic liberals, he lamented that "the creation of language still needs twists and turns"; after the rise of Li Jinfa's group of symbolists, he opposed the inexplicable difficulty caused by seeking subtlety...
In short, after a series of dissatisfactions, Feng Zhi appeared in front of Lu Xun in a timely manner. The lyricism, subtlety, and musicality of Feng Zhi's early poetry are accurately cast in the pot of poetry embraced by Lu Xun.
Can Feng Zhi bear the title of "China's Most Outstanding Lyric Poet"? We leave that aside. But what we can be clear about is that Lu Xun's love for young people is the guardianship of the "Shen Bell" that "sings lonely deeply at the bottom of the sea of people" (Lu Xun's "One Sleep").
Feng Zhi and his friends founded the journal "Shen Zhong"
In 1929, after compiling his second collection of poems, "Journey to the North and Others", Feng Zhi went to Germany the following year and began a study abroad career of nearly six years. After returning to China, he taught at Tongji University, but due to the Japanese invasion of China, he soon moved with the school and later taught at the Southwest United University in Kunming.
Throughout the 1930s, Feng Zhi hardly wrote any new poems, which was a gap in creation. However, under this superficial blankness, Feng Zhi's outlook on life and poetics is quietly evolving, and a Feng Zhi belonging to the "Fourteen Elements Collection" is gradually condensing and condensing into a form that stands still.
During his studies at heideberg University in Germany, Feng Studied under the existentialist master Jaspers. At that time, the existential philosophy was in the limelight and received more and more attention.
The founder of existentialism, Kirkekhor, once divided philosophers into two categories: abstract philosophers, who built a palace in their own thoughts, and he did not dwell in them, Hegel was; second, the existential philosophers, who thought about philosophical problems from the perspective of their innermost predicament, philosophy is the answer to their own problems, Nietzsche is.
When studying abroad, Feng Zhi stood before he could, whether it was a chaotic country or a turbulent individual, there was a lot of confusion. Obviously, in this context, existential philosophy is more suitable for extradition to the other shore.
Existentialist philosophy focuses on extreme experiences in everyday life, such as death, fear, trembling, etc., in order to achieve a deeper experience and understanding of survival. Nietzsche proposed desperately feeling life in order to give it a higher purpose and meaning. Jaspers also believes that only through the "marginal state" can we understand the sense of responsibility for life, inspire the greatest diligence and achieve true existence. All of this makes Feng Zhi begin to get rid of his previous small emotions, no longer fall into emotional uneasiness and anxiety, but use this to reflect on life and conduct deeper philosophical thinking.
If existential philosophers such as Jaspers and Kierkegur pried open The atrium of Von Zhi's closed heart and let the fresh air of nature blow through it, then Rilke, the existentialist poet, opened another door to the kingdom of poetry for him.
As early as in China, Feng Zhi learned some of Rilke's situation from his uncle Feng Wenqian, who studied aesthetics, and developed some interest in his poetry. During his studies abroad, he was able to study Rilke's works in depth in conjunction with the school curriculum, and carefully translated Rilke's "Letter to the Young Poet".
The Fourteen Elements in a Glass Window
The fourteen-line style used by Feng Zhi in the Fourteen Elements is itself influenced by Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus.
The sonnet was originally a folk poem in the Provence region at the junction of Italy and France, but due to the creative attempts of Peterrac and Shakespeare, the two asanas of The Pietrak and Shakespeare were differentiated. However, Feng Zhi imitated Rilke's variant, which was not so strict in prosody, mainly retaining the prosody of the paragraphs of four, four, three and three and the rhyme of the end of the sentence.
The reason why Feng Zhi adopted the fourteen-line body, in addition to Rilke's influence, also had the strange effect of the form of shackles: "Take my thoughts and give a proper arrangement." Rilke once said:
"Poetry is not emotion, as the average person says (emotions are enough), poetry is experience."
This sentence had a great influence on the transformation of Feng's identity as a lyric poet. In fact, Rilke's early poetry is similar to Feng Zhi's, and also has a touch of romanticism, but after coming into contact with existential philosophy and working with Michelangelo for a period of time, he began to pay attention to the observation of the things around him, using reason to pull the silk thread of emotion and inject it into the physical world, thus creating a series of "still life poems".
Feng Zhi's "Fourteen Elements" also has a large number of poems depicting the surrounding things and the past of relatives and friends, such as "There is a galley tree", "rat qucao", "Cai Yuanpei", "Lu Xun" and so on.
It is worth noting that these works written by objects or people are not realistic sketches that strive for realism, but project a specific image into the vast universe, and see the permanence of the universe in the subtleties. For example, in "There is a Gali Tree", "You always take off your shell / Withering only watch you grow", and "growing" in "Withering", which is interpreting the cycle of life and death.
The "Fourteen Elements" sees the spring and autumn in the end of the novel, the elephant with poetry, and the elephant with a poetic heart, just as one of the poems says:
Give me a narrow heart, a big universe!
At the entrance of southwest united university during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression
Text/Unnamed
Graph/Network
About the Author:
Unnamed, a native of eastern Zhejiang, a freelance writer, is committed to the reading promotion of classic literary and artistic works