1. Mu Dan's Poetry: In recent years, poetry critics and literary history circles have highly appraised Mu Dan, and think that he is a first-class poet on par with Guo Moruo, Xu Zhimo and Ai Qing.
Mu Dan's poems are very artistic and always show innovation in rebellion and heterogeneity against traditions (including those formed in the 1920s and 1930s). Among the nine-leaf poets, Mu Dan is undoubtedly the one who can best reflect the exploration of modernity of new poetry in the 1940s. With profound and complicated connotations, full inner passion and skillful and complicated skills, his poems have pushed the aesthetic quality of new poems to a new height, and the expressive force and penetrating power of Chinese have been presented to him as never before.
Mu Dan, whose real name is Cha Liang Zheng (1918-1971), is not only the most important poet in modern poetry, but also a famous translator. After liberation, Don Juan and Eugene onegin are well-known masterpieces.
Mu Dan's poetry creation began in 1930s, when he was a high school student in Nankai School in Tianjin. As a teenager, he has shown the characteristics of precocity and precocity, and expressed his concern about the real suffering and his exploration of life philosophy and the mysteries of the universe in his poems. 1938+0935, Mu Dan was admitted to Tsinghua University. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, he went to Kunming with the school and entered the National Southwest United University, where he began to show his unique poetic talent. In his early days, he first came into contact with English romantic poets. His words are also full of youthful colors and romantic feelings, such as the poem in "Garden": "When I stepped out of this messy door, I was locked in the past days,/the melancholy like grass,/the youth with red patterns." At that time, Mu Dan wrote "Shelley-style romantic poetry, which has a strong lyrical temperament and at the same time vented his dissatisfaction with reality." However, among these,
1937, he wrote his masterpiece "The Beast", depicting a beast with trauma standing up from a pool of blood and finding the image of a wild cry. The lines in the poem are full of tension, which means strange police and contains profound symbolic semantics. Poetry on the Wilderness makes an amazing self-analysis: "I cry from the wilderness of my heart,/for the beautiful truth I glimpsed,/and. /When I hanged the wrong childhood. " The poet's rational consciousness is highlighted from the simple emotional expression and has been warmly questioned. From self-monologue to conscious introspection, young Mu Dan quickly changed his poetic style. On the one hand, he learned the art of modern poetry from Ye Zhi, Eliot and Auden. On the other hand, he paid more attention to the grand and chaotic historical scenes around him. Another nine-leaf poet, Tang Qi, once said, "Mu Dan.
In the 1940s, Mu Dan's creation entered a mature stage. His poetic skills are exquisite, and he skillfully uses modern poetic techniques such as irony, symbolism, dramatic scenes, multi-voice monologues, collage and parody. He successfully integrated his understanding of the turbulent historical reality and personal spirit into his amazing poetic imagination, which triggered a metaphysical inquiry into the whole history and life. He also became "the most popular young poet at that time". His poems "aroused strong repercussions". When Wen Yiduo compiled Modern Poetry Notes, he collected many Mu Dan's poems, the number of which was second only to that of Xu Zhimo, a great poet in the 1920s, which also showed Mu Dan's important position at that time.
Theme analysis of poetry. Poetry is the main emotion, and its theme is often not as obvious as other narrative works, which can be simply summarized. Therefore, the induction here is also to facilitate discussion and grasp. When reading poetry, be careful not to do excessive segmentation.
The Rise of a Nation: This is a famous poem written by Mu Dan, which can be used to represent the first common theme in his poetry creation.
In the 1940s, historical consciousness and social conscience stood out in new poems, and kuya poets also explored new poetic expressive force in seeking the organic unity of society and individual, utility and art, times and self, which was the starting point of Mu Dan's poetry creation. Facing the harsh historical reality and embracing the life of the times, young poets have found their poetic imagination home. In Song of Roses, the poet who once "stood on the bridge between reality and dreams". But in the end, he said, "I want to get to the station in 1940, take a bus and drive to the hottest melting pot." The melting pot of the times made the poet feel the fiery atmosphere. 1940 when commenting on Bian's poems, he put forward the idea of "new lyricism": "In order to make poetry and this era become an emotional harmony, we need' new lyricism'", and this era, whether Mu Dan or inspired by this spirit of the times, wrote poems full of strong national consciousness, such as chorus, praise and flags, and praised the power of the people. However, unlike those simple and empty political lyrics during the Anti-Japanese War, his "praise" did not stop at the level of emotional catharsis, and the "chorus" containing a deeper perception of national suffering did not cover up his special and painful voice.
In this poem entitled "Praise", the "people" are not beautified or heroized, but are wrapped in shame. The combination of passionate tone and realistic perception makes this poem convey a unique power. In the poem "Cold Night in December", the poet changed his lyrical style and scanned the northern land with cold eyes: "Cold night in December, the wind swept away. What does he do? /On the way to this squeaky wheel. "
The earth in the cold wind and the confused nocturnal people all symbolize the historical destiny of the nation, but the poet's attitude is thoughtful and calm, which makes deep thoughts diffuse in the silent blank: "At the door, those old sickles,/hoes, ox yokes, stone mills, carts,/quietly, are undertaking the falling of snowflakes." Such poems convey something objectively and temperamentally.
The second theme, "Abundance and Abundance of Pain"
In addition to the poetry with the theme of nation and times, a kind of poetry with Mu Dan's personal characteristics is a dark interrogation of self, reality and even the whole history and truth. Yuan Kejia once said, "Mu Dan is undoubtedly the most capable person to express the almost cold consciousness of modern intellectuals". In his works, the absurdity behind the reality and the spiritual distortion experienced by individuals in history are all "skinned to see the bones". When leaving,/let's go back and forth in the tunnel of canine teeth, and let us believe that the disorder of your sentence/is a truth. And we converted,/you gave us a lot of pain. "
In this poem, "God", "history" and "truth" all become negative and heterogeneous. Deception leads "us" and adds richness and pain to existence in the disharmonious conflict. It can be said that Abundance and Abundance of Pain expresses a holistic view of world life and becomes a potential poet of Mu Dan.
First of all, it exists in the poet's in-depth criticism of reality and history: "And the dusk in May is so hazy! /After the torch shouts,/No one will see it/... Stupid people will jump into the mire,/and the murderer will sing the song of freedom in May/and hold on to all the main hubs of invisible electricity. "
The poet found intrigue and chaos after the complicated realistic appearance of society, but his cold insight did not stop at attacking and criticizing the "present" society, but further pointed to the inquiry of the ultimate truth of human history. The poet's identity is not only a realistic explorer, but also an explorer of a broad life, as he said in Thoughts on the 30th Birthday: "The supreme nothingness of human beings accepts orders from layer to layer,/but only an observing soldier.
In Mu Dan's body, this kind of "exploration" has no definite end, because he always finds that "the contradiction of history is oppressing us,/balancing and poisoning our every impulse". Many of Mu Dan's poems express the individual's nihility and absurd experience under historical injury, and even push to the representative of the ultimate value of the world-"God" or "truth".
Secondly, "the pain of wealth" is also the revelation of the spiritual course of modern intellectuals. Digging inward and writing conflicts and struggles with a thoughtful and sensitive attitude is another embodiment of modern consciousness in Mu Dan's poems. The poem "From Emptiness to Enrichment" describes an intellectual's struggle, disillusionment and rebirth under the trivial daily background of grand war. Through all kinds of characters and scenes. Let readers get in touch with the complex flow of the protagonist's consciousness in the poem. However, in Mu Dan's works, this psychological process is not a smooth road with clear direction, but is always in contradiction and trouble, always in an intermediary state, in the conflict between reality and ideal, past and future, hope and despair, light and darkness. : "between our arrival and destination,/between our gain and loss." (Yin) This painful and contradictory experience even extends to the deepest feelings of the individual, and his famous poem Eight Poems is a representative. This poem takes an objective cold treatment when dealing with the romantic themes of countless poets, exploring the fiery obsession of love and exploring the separation and alienation among them.
From reality to heart, from history to individual, from universal truth to personal feelings, "rich and rich pain" runs through Mu Dan's poems and constitutes a core theme.
The third theme that often appears in Mu Dan's poems is to express "incomplete me".
The difficult exploration of the pain, contradiction and absurdity of life makes the "self" in Mu Dan's poems vividly present a highly tense modern feature. Since the May 4th Movement, the "self" in new poetry has always appeared in capitalized form, and "I" is complete and heroic. Guo Moruo's poem "My Me Will Be Disillusioned" expresses this romantic self-awareness. However, in Mu Dan's poems, the complex, chaotic and irrational parts are highly displayed. Mu Dan wrote in the poem "I": "Without the womb and warmth, it is the incomplete part that longs to be saved, and it will always be itself, locked in the wilderness."
This self is incomplete, self-enclosed, and "I want to rush out of the fence and/or embrace myself with my hands" again and again. Not only did Guo Moruo's lyrical self-image not appear in Mudan's poems in the1920s, but the "dreamer" and "tired pedestrian" described by modernist poets in the191930s were also replaced by the above-mentioned "I" who cried for help in pain.
Self-destruction is not only the poet's subjective psychological feeling, but also the result of constant self-analysis and self-questioning, such as Lu Xun's "eat your own fruit" style. The Snake Temptation is based on the religious story that "people are tempted by snakes and driven out of the Garden of Eden by God after eating the fruit of wisdom", which describes a young man's psychological feelings of weakness and hesitation in modern life. The external environment description and the inner monologue flash alternately, which reminds people of Eliot's famous sentences. Am I still alive? I am alive/why? "The poet sends out a series of questions, but the result of the questions is deeper confusion:" Oh, I feel that I am caught between two whips./Which one should I bear? "The dark proposition of life ..." Mu Dan's typical practice is to rotate the "self" in the poem at the intersection of different forces, so that "I" becomes a conflicting existence and cannot be integrated into a harmonious unity. As the poem says, "Standing at an unstable point, all kinds of opportunities are intertwined, which is our poverty/happiness …" The poet stands between the past and the past.
Of course, Mu Dan's poems still express his desire to remould himself from division to integration, but "new combination" is often replaced by "new division" in both personal speculation and historical action. In the crowd, in the chorus of the times, he heard "collective joy, but at the same time he found" hooligans, liars and bandits, and we walked together in the chaotic street-you will also hear the Lord's snigger "You and I are constantly adding up/making us rich and dangerous" (eight songs). Under the pressure of history, "an ordinary person contains/countless assassinations and countless delays." (Complaining) Mu Dan's complex self-consciousness seems to be unable to be calm in any real object, and finally he can only resort to a transcendence of reality, history and nature. The ego can go back to the original incompleteness: "It's time, here is our misinterpreted life/please say it, here is our tired heart/please be gentle,/Lord, the source of hungry life, let us hear your flowing voice."
The isomorphism of "a nation has risen", "the pain of wealth" and "incomplete me" constitutes Mu Dan's complex and profound theme world. Here, society and individuals, times and self, eternity and the present are not only combined, but more importantly, they are intertwined to form mutual disasters, representing a modern China intellectual in history and reality.
Above, we have analyzed the common themes in Mu Dan's poems, from which we can understand the poet's unique perspective of experiencing, thinking and observing life, as well as his personalized discovery. These thoughts, experiences and discoveries are all expressed through Mu Dan's poetic style and form. Therefore, after the theme analysis, it is necessary for us to make a more general artistic analysis of Mu Dan's poems. For the convenience of narration, we summarize Mu Dan's poetic art as three innovations, or,
The first is the structure of dramatic tension.
In exploring the modernity of new poetry, kuya poets in the 1940s made a series of attempts, such as indirectness, objectivity, the combination of sensibility and intellectuality, and dramatic expression. These poetic techniques are also widely used in Mu Dan's poems, which embodies the "similarity characteristics of kuya poets". However, compared with the dignified beauty of images in Xin Di and his poems, it is also compared with the humorous irony that can be seen everywhere in the poems of Du Fu and Yuan Kejia. The personal style in Mu Dan's poems is very obvious, which constitutes a kind of "tension beauty" different from others. He developed a unique poetic art from his profound insight into "rich and rich pain" and "self-division", that is, he always framed his own poetic lines in the collision of paradox, contrast and different factors. Zheng Min pointed this out when analyzing Mu Dan's poems. People think that his poems "always revolve around one or several contradictions". This kind of poetic art not only effectively expresses its theme, but also fully realizes the dramatization of the new poetry of kuya Poetry School. Yuan Kejia thinks: "Poetry is the final mode after different tensions are harmonious."
"Tension" is first manifested in Mu Dan's poetic style. Mu Dan's poetic styles are mainly divided into two types: one is lyric short poems, which are concise and compact, expressing inner feelings and speculation; One kind is dramatic poetry, such as Lyric in the Air-raid Shelter, From Emptiness to Enrichment, and Ghost-to-Ghost Debate. The structure of this kind of poems is complex, generally using many people, constantly changing angles, interweaving inner introspection, scene narration and other people's words, forming a multi-voice effect, showing complicated dramatic tension. The lyrics in the bomb shelter are like this.
Another "tension" mode in Mu Dan's poems is the defamiliarization juxtaposition of different types of experiences, discourses and poetic contexts. The most typical poem "May" begins like this: "May flowers come/cuckoos wander to make people busy/everything grows, the sky is high and the clouds are light/the prodigal son travels far and misses his hometown."
After such an ancient ballad, the poetic style suddenly changed: "Browning, Mao Se, Portable No.3/or revolver that exploded into human flesh/they gave me happiness after despair."
Since then, poetic lines have developed alternately in these two poetic contexts and styles. As Mr. Wang Zuoliang said, "Two poetic styles, two spiritual worlds and two eras" formed an "abrupt contrast". Through this dramatic juxtaposition, the irony effect expressed the poet's profound understanding of historical reality.
Mu Dan's poems are permeated with a sense of "tension" in terms of words and lines. Reading his poems, readers will find that he prefers to write from the place of opposition and contradiction, and through the contest between the two opposing forces, his poems are tortuous and in-depth expressive. For example, "In the past and the future, the earth, ideas and glory are lifted up with the constant death/present." ("Division, conspiracy, revenge/all these push us to the opposite extreme,/we should suddenly turn around and see you" ("looming") "His pain is constantly seeking.
The order, if obtained, must be deviated. "("Eight Poems ")
Stimulating poetic imagination in the "opposite extremes" not only forms a tension effect, but also effectively expands the meaning space of poetry. This is the so-called "complexity of thinking and linearity of emotion", which not only expands the function of poetry expression, but also may be more suitable for expressing modern people's thoughts and feelings. This kind of poem is difficult to understand, so it is often difficult to grasp its tension in this complicated entanglement.
Mu Dan once said, "Poetry to write' amazing at the end of discovery' is to write a unique experience that no one has ever had before. Using the principle of "tension", Mu Dan activated a brand-new "surprise" in his real feelings and experiences.
Thinking with body is the second aspect of Mu Dan's artistic innovation in poetry.
The combination of sensibility and intellectuality is the common feature of nine-leaf poets. In addition to expressing the connotation of thinking about life and philosophical mysteries in poetry, it also refers to a unique modern poetry skill: ideological perception, that is, instead of using perceptual image symbols and metaphorical rational speculation, the intellectual content is directly turned into a perceptible object, just as the modernist poet Eliot described it: smelling thoughts like roses. This technique is used in Mu Dan's poems.
Mu Dan's poems contain many thoughts, many of which are even similar to abstract speculation. However, such poems can arouse readers' strong buzz and even make them feel physically uneasy. The reason is that poets often turn their mental activities into physical feelings and externalize their thoughts into concrete physical perception or physiological images, such as the following poem: "Because of your boldness, it is your farthest world:/My skin also endows it with its breathtaking piety." "(Discovery)" ... Ah, this bustling place/full of ambition for young blood/a tired cold wind blowing between its pillars "(Poetry)" What you and I touch is a meadow,/where there is its stubbornness, I am surprised. " (eight poems
The above poems are full of bold whimsy, and the inner fluctuations and abstract ideas have become a reality that can be touched and felt. "Body" is the center of these poems. Around it, the poet seems to have broken the boundaries between spirit and flesh, self and the world, and matter and spirit. The so-called "complex thinking, full of emotions" has a special poetic beauty effect. Tang Tao pointed out, "Mu Dan may be one of the few people in China who can think for themselves and themselves. One of the lyric poets who give life to everything, and it seems to be one of the few lyric poets in China with emotional feelings and thoughts. " "Assimilating life" refers to Mu Dan's ability to transform everything into sensory perception.
Spring is Mu Dan's masterpiece, which expresses a confused youth self-consciousness. The natural scenes depicted in the poem always convey the body's desire and anxiety: "The green flame is swaying on the grass,/he is eager to hug you, flower."
Nature is personified. It yearns for and swings, symbolizing the outbreak of life. The last sentence is particularly amazing: "You are ignited, but there is nowhere to go. /Oh, light, shadow, sound and color are all naked,/suffering, waiting for a new combination. "
Here, light, shadow, sound, color and natural elements are also endowed with the perception of the body-"nakedness" and "pain", and the poet's thinking about life is perfectly transformed into an extension of the body, forming a "new combination".
If the combination of intellectuality and sensibility is an ideal of modern poetics, then "thinking with the body" is its concrete scheme. Mu Dan's writing successfully realized this point and verified the ability of poetic imagination to reorganize reality, thoughts and feelings.
The third innovation of Mu Dan's poetic art is the response to traditional poetry.
Among the poets of new poetry, Mu Dan is the least influenced by China's traditional poetry, which is the result of his conscious choice. Mu Dan has said more than once that he opposes the so-called poetic "romantic love" and advocates taking special modern experience as the object of expression. He tried to achieve fresh and unique poetry by pursuing "non-poetry". He thinks that the main difference between China's poetry and western poetry (modern poetry) lies in: "Is it true or not? Can modern life be the source of poetic images? "
From the day when new poetry came into being, it broke the shackles of the external form of old poetry, but the aesthetic ideal of blending classical poetry with scenes and combining thinking with environment is still secretly shaping the character of new poetry. In the poems of Dai Wangshu and Bian He, we can easily see the continuation of exquisite classical aesthetic taste, which constitutes a unique landscape in the development of new poetry and also illustrates the complex relationship between tradition and modernity. But here, Mudan, this emotion is consciously resisted. In his poems, readers seldom see the poetic realm of the destroyer Fenghua Xuefeng, and more are materialized and heterogeneous modern experiences. In his early poem "Restore by Modern Means", some ugly words such as "pig in the mud" appeared. In his own words, "this poem was written in' non-poetic' words."
The reaction to classical poetry is not only manifested in the modernization of poetry materials, but also in the formation of aesthetic quality of poetry. The aesthetic purpose of classical poetry is balance, harmony and the blending of subject and object, and the seamless realm is the ideal of poetry. However, in Mu Dan's case, the application of the tension principle broke the "beauty of neutralization" and made me and things, me and the world, me and others present crises and crises.
In terms of language, Mu Dan also showed a kind of "non-poetic" rebellious psychology, liberating new poetry from the narrowness of closed "poetic language". There has been a lot of debate about whether new poetry is "prosaic" or "purely poetic". An important idea in Pure Poetry is to regard poetry as a special language, far away from everyday plain spoken language. In concrete practice, the suggestibility of language forms a beautiful poetic style. But such poetic language is very rare in Mu Dan's poems. He not only introduced a large number of modern life words into his poems, but also often used logical related words and Europeanized syntax as the backbone of his poems, forming a rational reasoning force: "Although they are dead now,/Although they have not lived,/They left an immortal memory. /When we beg for mercy,
In just a few lines, the repeated use of logical related words, on the one hand, makes the semantics accurate and powerful, without vague hints; On the other hand, the interweaving of poetic connotations is in sharp contrast with the gentle and soothing syntax of poets in the 1930s. Mu Dan is also quite distinctive in the use of words. The main words in his poems are not the traditional poetic words centered on natural images and full of sensibility. In addition to modern everyday language, there are a lot of abstract conceptual words, such as "despair", "history", "temptation" and "logic".
"I grew up in the landscape of ancient poetry, and our sun is too old." Mu Dan once wrote such a poem. His writing broke away from the landscape of ancient poetry and explored new poetry in the world of prose. Because it is different from people's general aesthetic expectation, his poems give people the impression that they are too dense, too conceptual and even obscure, but as Tang Tao said, "China is rarely in his poems.
From the day when new poetry appeared, expressing the life and feelings of modern China people with poetry became the potential motive force for the development of new poetry, which, in a sense, constituted a sign that new poetry was different from "old poetry" or "western poetry". In the 1920s, it showed the poet's general concern for social life. In 1930s, "modernist" poets put forward this modernity ideal. In the 1940s, Mu Dan and kuya poets combined China's special historical reality with modern poetry art and embarked on a unique path. Their exploration can be said to have realized this ideal, that is, to express the feelings and thoughts of modern people in the form of "modern poetry".