We can judge whether a person is a literary genius by his works. Those works that can still shine, shock readers from generation to generation, nourish and soothe the human soul after being honed and washed by time are the best basis for judging a writer's historical value and the best proof of his talent. Looking at Xu Zhimo's poems carefully, we can't say that they are not pure poems, that they are not the living beating of the soul, and that they are not the breathing of the soul. However, we can only say that it is a pure poem about personal love, a soul that lives for earthly ideal love, and a soul that can't live for love ideal. Poems bred by such a mind, such a poetic mind, will make everyone who has been in love or has never been in love move and sing. However, this kind of poem is only a shallow chant, and its beauty is a trickle, not a torrent of the Yangtze River. As he himself said in "After Reading Shelley's Poems", "I like reading light poems; Too rich to understand ","I really can't understand Shelley because he is too rich and too great. " Moreover, he also commented on Shelley: "He became a great poet because he had a very pure love for the ideal beauty. Not only love, but also beauty as a religious belief. His so-called beauty is not specific. He believes that beauty is the spirit of the universe, and the spirit of beauty is God. Everything in the universe is born of beauty. " He also said that poets are priests who accept inspiration and legislators of the world. So he wants to add a Confucius-style sigh at the end of the article: "What's wrong with me!" Hu Shi once commented on him: "His outlook on life is really a kind of' simple belief', and there are only three big characters in it: one is love, the other is freedom, and the third is beauty." He really deserves these three words, but he is on another level different from Shelley, that is, the secular level. He pinned all this on his extraordinary desire and dream for ideal love. Lin and Lu Xiaoman are their carriers, and his affection for them is "recent love". And his own poetry is such a shocking emotional footprint.
Someone asked Gu Cheng when interviewing him, "What do you think a great poet needs?" Gu Cheng said: "I think what a great poet needs first is a soul, a soul that is always awake, smiling and in pain, a soul that looks at the reflection of the wine glass and everything and its own soul, a soul that looks at the blood, thoughts and emotions on the river bank, a soul that is loved and moved by the CD-ROM drive and moves forward in layers of illusions. He doesn't know anything and knows everything. He doesn't ask for anything but knows everything, so he smiles and asks for everything, so he is miserable. Men ... release life from finiteness and tend to infinity in one sentence, and let life live freely in everything it controls forever. He has the ability to create. In addition to this most important condition ... we need soil, music, history, roads, strong and pure national wine and language. Without a language that echoes many times in the Grand Canyon, success is impossible. " Perhaps this is a kind of self-discipline from Gu Cheng, but it really suits him. However, it seems that we cannot apply this standard to Xu Zhimo. We can't say that his poems have no soul, and his poems also have beautiful music-fresh and light lyricism. However, it should be accurately said that there is no "history, road, strong and pure national wine" in his poems, and his poetic language has not reached the level of "echoing many times in the Grand Canyon".
Specifically, from the perspective of his time, the artistry of his poems reached the peak of that time, which is incomparable to Dai Wangshu and those who have heard more than one person. However, his poems failed to become the voice of the times and the lyrics of the national collective, which is why his Farewell to Cambridge is not as good as Rain Lane.
His poems don't point to the ultimate meaning. Compared with Tagore, the greatest poet in India whom he admires most and has the closest relationship with him, everything will be clearer.
What is the purpose of poetry? Tagore said, "We poets make people surpass their desires."
Tagore said: "Poetry is the voice of newborn children, which makes it correspond to the voice of the universe."
There is also a more excessive evaluation-"Zhimo's wandering feelings make him unable to become a poet, and his distractions make him unable to become a scholar." After quoting these two sentences, Xu Zhimo admitted: "This is an evaluation given to me by a friend. Of course, my humor doesn't allow me to admit that he really sees through me. " Xu Zhimo has never really been intoxicated or infatuated with poetry itself in his life, so he has no own way of poetry. His inner poetry was finally dissolved in the struggle against Lu Xiaoman's vulgarity and depravity.
Pushkin died in a duel to protect the dignity of love, Shelley died in the embrace of the sea, Byron became a national hero of Greece as a British citizen and ended his life in a thunderstorm. Xu zhimo suddenly fell while flying in the air ... but Xu zhimo's name is obviously not as brilliant as others. Because anyone else can represent a country and a great era, but what does Xu Can Shima stand for?
So what is Xu Zhimo's great contribution to poetry? Xu Zhimo and Wen Yiduo advocated the three beauties of poetry, architecture and painting together, and became the most successful representatives of practicing the three beauties. Therefore, the standard form of modern poetry was created in the history of new poetry, a bit like that of Yang, Lu and Luo in the early Tang Dynasty. Unfortunately, Xu Zhimo's practice was greatly damaged by the poet's tragic love experience. The young poet died young, and his groundbreaking new poem almost became a masterpiece. Today, when we can't learn anything from modern poetry because we can't read good poems, we can't help thinking of Xu Zhimo. Think of his active pursuit of new poetry creation.
However, it must be mentioned that Xu Zhimo is definitely a talented essayist.
Xu Zhimo is a wayward child.
Xu Zhimo's life is legendary. He will never be lonely, and he will always pursue fresh hot spots and novel ways of life. In his poetic bones, in the dictionary of his life, the boring, mediocre and lifeless ordinary life has been eliminated forever, and he is a bright red jumping flame. Maybe we will think that his life is really gorgeous, colorful and intriguing, but his people, himself, are almost absolutely pure. He once quoted a passage from Wordsworth's poem We Are Seven in My Grandma's Death, and made a concrete exposition:
A simple child,
Live his happy time,
In a hurry, lively,
How to distinguish between life and death?
These four lines are famous poems by william wordsworth, an English poet.
The poem is called the beginning of We Are Seven, which is his whole poem.
This idea. This poet who loves nature and children once met an eight-year-old girl.
Cute and fluffy, he asked her how many brothers and sisters she had, and she said there were seven of us and two.
In the city, two are out of town, and one sister and one brother are in the church near her home.
Buried in the cemetery. But her children's psychology does not distinguish between life and death She carries it with her every night.
Her dry snacks and side dishes go to the grass of the cemetery to eat alone and sing alone.
To her brothers and sisters who sleep in the mound, although silent, she is brilliant.
Childlike heart has never felt the incredible gap between life and death; So, let Hua Weng give many examples.
Well, she just opened a pair of smart little eyes and replied, "But, sir, we are still."
Seven people. "
To some extent, Xu Zhimo is like a child. He faces the world with his way of thinking and heart and will take the same actions as a child. So sometimes he is as innocent and lovely as a child, and sometimes he is more cruel than the devil. Children's behavior, we can't rule with good and evil. So, when Zhang Youyi arrived in Marseille port and vomited because of the bumpy journey, he shook his head and said in disgust, "You are really a hillbilly." When Zhang Youyi told him she was pregnant, he immediately said, "Get him out of here." Zhang Youyi said people would die. He even said, "Someone died by train. Don't you see people don't take the train? " It is hard to imagine that this ridiculous and hateful logic will appear in a poetic population praised by friends-perhaps only ignorant children can spit out such words! Therefore, the image of Xu Zhimo is either cute or hateful in people's eyes. But in the end, people will forgive his hatred, because who really cares about a child's words and deeds? Later, instead of hating him, Zhang Youyi became his good friend and the Xu family's good daughter-in-law. Later, she said, "You always ask me if I love Xu Zhimo. You know, I can't answer this question. I am puzzled by this question, because people always tell me that I have done so much for Xu Zhimo and I must love him. However, I can't say what love is. I have never said "I love you" to anyone. If taking care of Xu Zhimo and his family is called making love, then I probably love him. Among the women he met in his life, maybe I love him the most. " However, this untimely son died of meningitis three years later. Xu Zhimo left him for only four months, but never saw him again. At this time, he found a little sense of fatherhood: "I am not heartless." Why am I so indifferent to my own flesh and blood? "
In fact, any poet is close to children, either hidden or obvious. The most famous person is Gu Cheng, a fairy tale poet. Wordsworth's poems just now can also let us appreciate his innocence. This is especially true for Xu Zhimo. He once wrote: "The true and pure world is children's world, children's world is paradise, and their life is a life of sympathy. The poet's life is as pure and rich as a child, and the poet's imagination is particularly like a child. Poets are as lovely as children. " Therefore, he highly praised the "New Moon Collection", because those poems are the most touching voices of childlike innocence! Therefore, it is no coincidence that his later traces are always inseparable from the word "new moon", so that their famous poetry school is also called "new moon school". I am convinced that in Xu Zhimo's heart, he really has a profound * * * sound with the music of Crescent Moon, which has become the main theme of his life.
Xu Zhimo's character was cultivated from childhood. As the only son of the Xu family, he was pampered, gently cared for and loved by everyone. Therefore, he has achieved his naughty and stubborn natural character that is not bound and stifled by others. As an adult, he is more pure, but lacks some maturity. The smooth life experience made him not know what the world was, so his cuteness remained the same and he was never burned by the sinister world. His stubbornness and rebellion are also lurking quietly, ready to break out at some point. A great sage and great wisdom like Liang Qichao can't wake him up. Lu Xiaoman was criticized by ten thousand people for smoking a pipe, holding a player, being extravagant, but unable to perceive it. He just used the style that should have been used to write beautiful poems to write hopeless demands and remember shocking economic accounts!
His innocence also influenced his poetry. Commenting on his prose, Liang Shiqiu said that when writing any topic, Zhimo always holds an affectionate attitude, just like a friend's "heart-to-heart", and his words and expressions are "willful". Moreover, Xu Zhimo himself said that his articles were like Running Wild Horse. If these words are related to children, there should be no doubt! So are his poems.
So, at this time, we finally deeply realized the mood of bidding farewell to Cambridge. A child-like poet, a child-like life has been covered by the secular, burned by the complexity of the secular, and gradually began to transform into a vulgar and heavy adult world. That kind of farewell, farewell is precisely the gorgeous truth flying, ushered in the sad and sad loneliness!
Xu Zhimo transformed the classical tradition of China with the romantic tradition of Europe, which made his poems present two aspects of tradition. For example, many old words are used in his poems, and there are some allusions, or the classical poems are diluted. For another example, his poems pay attention to musicality, orderly paragraphs and harmonious phonology, which are the characteristics of traditional Chinese and western poems.
The greatest representative of Xu Zhimo's poetic tradition is his lyricism. He expresses romantic feelings, while modern poetry needs profound thoughts and complex skills. He is known as the "philosopher of poetry", but he basically has no philosopher's thinking, and the ideas in his poems are also very weak, simple, simple and simple. Simile is more than metaphor, directness is more than suggestion, and emotion is more than reason; It is these romantic and lyrical factors that make Xu Zhimo's poems meet the usual aesthetic expectations of the world for the poet's image; Of course, Xu Zhimo was recognized by the public because of his stories, especially his love affair of pursuing beautiful women. This kind of imagination and rumor is not only a distortion of Xu Zhimo, but also an injury to the image of modern poets. As we all know, this is not typical for modernist poets.