Due to the changes in ideological content and artistic techniques of misty poetry, China's poetry tradition and appreciation habit have been strongly impacted, and two completely different views have been produced. The title of "misty poetry" was slightly derogatory at first, and it was popular in contemporary poetry circles. It can be traced back to the article "The Haze of Forgetting" published by Zhang Ming in the eighth issue of 1980.
This article was triggered by a poem "Autumn" by the old poet Du Fu, which was published in Poetry Journal 1980 1: "Even the pigeon whistle sounds mature, and the noisy summer with showers has passed/I don't think about the severe and sultry test and the detailed memories of dangerous games." In Zhang Ming's view, the wording of this poem makes people feel strange and awkward, which makes people have psychological obstacles.
Then he quoted the young poet Li Xiaoyu's Night as an example. He thinks this kind of poem is obscure and bizarre, which makes people understand, half understand, and even fully understand. Really stuffy, stuffy, so I wrote this article. In order to avoid suspicion of rudeness, he called this poetic style "hazy style"
Since then, "misty poetry", a slightly derogatory title, has become the general name of the trend of new poetry in the future, and a fierce debate has been launched around "misty poetry". One side of the argument holds a positive and appreciative attitude, and the main representatives are Xie Mian, Sun Shaozhen and Xu Jingya. They are written in front of a new rise, a new aesthetic principle in the rise, and a rising poetry group.
It contributed to the wave of new poetry, so it is called "a rising star". Xie Mian fully affirmed and supported the exploration and innovation of new poetry. He pointed out that in the face of new challenges, a number of new poets are rising. They don't stick to one pattern, boldly draw lessons from the expression techniques of modern western poetry and write some seemingly strange but actually novel and unique poems. This scene is really exciting!
This gives some rationality or legitimacy to the exploration of new poetry. A few months later, Sun Shaozhen published the article "New Aesthetic Principles are Rising". On the one hand, he supported Xie Mian's viewpoint, on the other hand, he raised it to "the height of new aesthetic principles" to understand it. He believes that the rise of this wave of poetry "is not so much the rise of new people as the rise of a new aesthetic principle."
The so-called "new aesthetic principle" means "disdaining to be the trumpet of the spirit of the times and making great achievements outside the world of self-emotion". They "don't praise life directly, but pursue the secret that life is dissolved in the soul", that is, express themselves. Xu Jingya's publication of "The Rising Poetry Group" in 1983 is the social and historical root of obscure poetry.
This paper systematically and concretely explains the poet's poetic attitude, text experiment and style characteristics, which, like a manifesto of China's modernism, caused an uproar in the literary world, thus pushing the debate on misty poetry to a new stage. The other side of the argument is represented by Li Ding, Zheng Bonong and Daixi Cheng.