On the Artistic Techniques of Ai Qing's Selected Poems

Ai Qing stepped onto the poetic scene under the influence of western symbolism and impressionism. He read the poems of Baudelaire, the author of Flowers of Evil, who claimed to "discover beauty from evil", and he also loved to write the poems of Rambo with colorful vowels, which made Ai Qing have a certain understanding of modernist creative techniques at the beginning of his creation, but at the same time he never forgot that he was a great researcher. In 1930s, faced with the situation that realism and romanticism were in the ascendant in the creation of new poetry, Ai Qing consciously shouldered the historical mission of comprehensive creation, making himself the first poet in modern China who successfully integrated modernism, romanticism and realism.

His poems combine the expressionism of modernist art with the realism of realistic art, and the eager embrace of reality with surreal symbols, metaphors and fables, thus transforming the external life of reality into the internal conscious expression, creating a multi-dimensional aesthetic space full of fables, symbols and imagination based on social real life and beyond the realistic appearance.

The following year, Ai Qing published his first book of poetry, Dayan River, which included nine poems, including Dayan River, My Nanny, Paris and Reed Flute. These poems are deeply rooted in the soil of realism, go out of the narrow circle of straightforward description, consciously absorb the nutrition of romanticism, and combine some reasonable factors in modernism to find a new way of lyricism and rich images, which not only

Realistic works infect people with the authenticity and concreteness of images, and select, refine and summarize real life materials through typical methods, thus profoundly revealing some essential characteristics of life. Ai Qing believes that "the greatest poet is always the most loyal spokesman of the era in which he lives;" The highest work of art is always the most authentic record of the emotion, fashion, interest and so on of that era. Based on this understanding and thinking, his poems all come from his direct experience of the realistic context, sincere concern for the fate of the country and the nation, and show strong realism.