China academic poet
Our so-called academic poet generally includes the following characteristics: the poet has received strict academic education or taught in colleges and universities for a long time, preaching and teaching and cultural discussion are important parts of his career, and his emphasis on knowledge and learning constitutes his main life pursuit, and his choice of poetic art is generally subject to such a life purport and personality pursuit. Wen Yiduo in the Red Candle Period and Bian, a modernist poet in 1930s, are important representatives of modern academic poets in China. Wen Yiduo in the "Red Candle" period was calm and simple, strict with himself, just like a traditional Confucian scholar. He rejected the entertainment that ordinary people took for granted with his hard study and cultural research, and accompanied him to the poetry world with his serious thinking on Chinese and western poetry art and academic criticism on current poetry, such as the famous comments on Yu Pingbo's Winter Night and Guo Moruo's Goddess. Bian "always tends to be restrained, as if deliberately trying to be a cold-blooded animal" [1]. Therefore, he is suitable to teach in Sichuan University and The National SouthWest Associated University, or engage in stable translation work. He also tried to get out of his study and join the tide of social movements, but eventually he returned silently. 1938 Yan 'an failed to leave him behind, so that at the critical moment of China's historical upheaval, he was still immersed in the fog of the Cotswold medieval mountain village, a secluded place in England [1]. Compared with these academic poets, other writers we are familiar with seem to have other ways. Guo Moruo was obviously troubled by the fiery social enthusiasm, while Mu Dan paid attention to the truth and pain that existed more widely outside the "college" (Passengers Unloaded from the Fantasy Route). He is more like a writer who went to society under the influence of Lu Xun's spirit, and Hu Feng, who was also deeply influenced by Lu Xun, supported a group of extremely informal university education.
Of course, we find that the more important difference between academic poets who are alienated from society by "academic school" and non-academic poets who are going to experience life in society lies in their understanding of art. Poets who try to create their own lives in society usually prefer to capture the facts of life around them or the true rhythm of their hearts. Their rational understanding of the art of poetry is often their understanding of life and existence itself. They are naturally not without cultural taste and pursuit, but relatively speaking, these "cultures" do not appear in their creative practice in the form of knowledge or rational guidance. "Culture" has been integrated into their spiritual feelings. China culture, western culture, new culture and old culture, they don't have the time or are not used to explaining their artistic impulse with such clear conceptual analysis. For example, in Guo Moruo's Call, the poetic heritage of ancient and modern China and foreign countries is an inseparable whole: "I think of Yabo in Zhou Dynasty,/I think of Sao Hao in Chu State,/I think of poets in Tang Dynasty,/I think of Cao in Yuan Dynasty,/I think of ancient Indian poets who wrote Vedas!" /Dante for the divine comedy! /Milton for Paradise Lost! /Goethe Who is Faust's tragedy! "(The creator) Whitman's grandeur, Tagore's tranquility, Qu Sao's profundity and Wang Wei's lightness swept through, while the poet Guo Moruo was embarrassed by being attacked from all sides. It is his inner passion that dilutes the boundaries of "culture". In Guo Moruo's creation, different kinds and even far-reaching poetic heritages are juxtaposed in "for our use", thus forming. Ai Qing, the leader of the July Poetry School, has his own rational construction-on poetry, but his theory is not so much a summary of the research results of Chinese and foreign poetic systems as a refinement of his own artistic practice. Therefore, the expression of "On Poetry" is a unique random judgment of the poet, and it is not famous for its strict concept in the poetry world, but for its strong realistic pertinence. Ai Qing's own creation is not the essence of modulating Chinese and foreign poetry art, but the sudden progress and display of life. [2] Another July Poet, Aaron's "poetics" is also "extreme" and full of emotion because of his concern for the practical significance of existence. In his view, "Poetry is a red flare falling from the sky", and the tasks of poetry and poets are two: "A. As the last bomb in the national war against Japan; B. As a member of the Anti-Japanese National War. " [3] Similarly, Mu Dan, a poet of "Nine Leaves School" who is famous for his "anti-tradition", also consciously inherited the spiritual legacy of Lu Xun, a social writer. His abandonment of China's classical poetry tradition did not come from his academic research, but was entirely the result of his real observation of real life. Wang Zuoliang said that Mu Dan "on the one hand is best at expressing the tortured and tortured feelings of China intellectuals, on the other hand, his best quality is completely non-China." [4] What needs to be added is that this "on the other hand" quality is not the poet's deliberate choice, because "Mu Dan's victory lies in his complete ignorance of ancient classics". [4] The dense bones and the pain of being "besieged" on the anti-Japanese battlefield provided Mu Dan with a brand-new image and new emotions. Sincerely presenting such artistic feelings has produced an "anti-traditional" effect, and as an art practitioner, Mu Dan obviously does not need to find more reasons for this strange effect. From 65438 to 0940, Mu Dan published two poems, On Ai Qing and Bian Zhi Lin, in Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao. Judging from the few poems of these two poets, passionate words and emotional language remind us of the styles of colleagues of the July Poetry School such as Ai Qing, A Long and Hu Feng, which shows that Mu Dan still embodies similarities with social poets in essence.
Different from the above-mentioned poets, our so-called academic poets are more accustomed to linking artistic practice with their knowledge exploration and cultural construction. Their vision of cultural construction seems to be a concrete choice of literature (poetry), and it is necessary to explain the specific trend of poetry creation under the background of more grand cultural knowledge. On the other hand, because the cultural problems in China in the 20th century are often understood as "binary opposition" between China and the West-many specific issues involved, such as opening and closing, old and new, modernization and nationalization, are habitually brought into the cultural pattern of confrontation between China and the West for discussion by academic circles, so for academic poets who are deeply influenced by academic circles, The choice of poetic art is often associated with the choice of Chinese and Western cultures and the choice of Chinese and Western poetic art (Note: For this "binary opposition model", please refer to Wang Furen's query on a research model, Journal of Foshan University of Science and Technology, 1996, (1). )。 On the poems written by Zhou Zuoren 1922, the way of thinking is how about China, Europe and India, which is the way of thinking of academic intellectuals. The next year, Wen Yiduo commented on the "local color" of Goddess, fully expounding the cultural confrontation between China and the West. The conception of China's new poems put forward by Wen Yiduo at that time did not involve the uniqueness of personal feelings. What caught his attention was the "culture" of China and the West: "I always thought that new poetry was new, not only in China, but also in the West. In other words, he doesn't want to be a pure local poem, but he still wants to keep the local color. He doesn't want to do pure foreign poetry, but he should try to absorb the advantages of foreign poetry. He wants to be Miao Zi after the marriage of Chinese and Western arts. " [5] In 1930s, Bian, another academic poet, was inspired by the similarity between Chinese and western poetry, and with his broad poetic vision, he made new communication between China's classical poetry and western modern poetry, such as implication and objectivity, artistic conception and dramatic treatment, and took this as an important basis for his poetic ideal of "blending Chinese and western".
In this context, it is not difficult for us to understand Ren Hongyuan's "double transcendence". This cultural confrontation between China and the West is a typical way of thinking of academic poets.
Ren Hongyuan as an "academic school"
Then, as an academic poet, what is Ren Hongyuan's image worthy of attention in contemporary poetry creation?
First of all, as a poet in his sixties, Ren Hongyuan is nothing like pedantry, parochialism and complacency, which are not uncommon in other age groups. He always pays close attention to what is happening in contemporary poetry and tries to keep pace with the times. The "frontier" of his poetic discourse and the "avant-garde" of his poetic criticism are enough to qualify him for dialogue with the "contemporary pioneers". Behind this phenomenon is the poet Ren Hongyuan. Decades of poetry * * * made him hear and witness too many changes and disasters. As an intellectual who grew up in the early 1960s, he deeply understood that the self-blockade of nationalism meant stagnation, which meant that China in the 20th century had to experience "lermontov's 65,438+Russia's pain in the 9th century" [6]. In the most vigorous era of "Classics+Poetry" movement, Ren Hongyuan in the19th century was fascinated by western romantic literature. In 1957, "I understood Pushkin's longing and disillusionment in early spring", "From 1966, I learned more about lermontov's' cliffs and thunder' in The Dark Age of Nicholas I, as well as Byron's elegy about the future written on the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, Shelley's flying clouds, larks and westerly winds. "The longest poem I have read is lermontov's Meditation." [6] In the early 1980s, he looked around for Borges's Man and fell in love with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and of course Pound and Eliot. Although he didn't go with the flow easily, he basically agreed with the "horizontal transplantation" of poetry, just as he later began to "recognize tradition".
Secondly, Ren Hongyuan's existence as an academic poet is also the key to his rejection of the impetuous poetry at the end of the century. The inherent peaceful, stable and self-sufficient lifestyle of academic school is essentially different from some operating modes of "going to society" in contemporary poetry.
At the end of the 20th century, there was a great uproar in China's poetry circles, and the surging tide of poetry revealed people's anxiety of "going to the world" at the last moment of the 20th century, which aggravated the impetuousness of poetry creation itself. In the bustling crowd, Ren Hongyuan was lonely: "People who were ten years earlier than me finally heard the faint echo of modernism after the ebb tide in China in the 1940s;" And people who are ten years behind me just catch up with a menacing post-80s generation. In the middle, I was lost in the loneliness at both ends. " [6] A hundred flowers blossomed in the 20th century, but he really felt: "As long as the heads of a generation of intellectuals are not sacred mountains in Olympia and cannot be desecrated, our19th century is not over." [6] The horizon is at 1956, the second universe is at 1957, the roof of Beijing Ancient Company is at 1966, the comet is at 1970, and the comet is at 198 1. Sima Qian 1987, the Second Genesis, Chinese characters, 1988 2000, Nu Wa1Elephant 1989, all of which have been worked hard for more than 30 years. Moreover, what is more striking is that in the creative career of more than 30 years, the change of poetic style before and after the poet is quite slow. From 1956 "The horizon can't limit our vision" to 1989 "Walking headless and standing tall", we can recognize a consistent pursuit at a glance: praising personal life. The more noisy the end of the century, the more determined his pursuit is: "Why do you want to imitate others and say' beat generation',' brooding generation' and' angry generation'? We are just a humiliating generation. " [6] For poetry, loneliness is a kind of luck, and persistence is a valuable quality. Ren Hongyuan's lonely situation and long-term adherence to the high wall of the college determined that he could not strive for innovation alone, nor could he turn a blind eye to the problems of Chinese and Western poetics for the urgency of creation.
Thirdly, he is sincere in the art of poetry and persistent in his exploration of poetry. After all, Ren Hongyuan is different from ordinary social poets. For example, Mu Dan's questioning and exploration of real life has never entered the art world of Ren Hongyuan. The poet's elegant intellectual temperament makes him more willing to use poetry to push the suffering of survival to a distant realm, although he had a semi-hungry childhood. "Sichuan, a remote mountain village, even except grandma's face every day, [7] he spent his childhood without his parents." I/kloc-have a father at the age of 0/3 and a mother at the age of 40 "[8]. 1966 that terrible summer, "I escaped, but there was no corner for me to escape." On the farm near 1970 intertidal zone, he was a slave. 1On the night of April 4th, 976, he was only one step away from the bloody suppression. We can see that Mu Dan is good at stirring up the suffering of this existence. For example, the inflation of 1945 became Mu Dan's poem: "In your glory, justice is only pitiful/You are a spider web with only maggots in the middle,/If we want to live, they must die,/When the weather is fine, your rule must be destroyed first!" (Inflation) 1976' s city life made him feel: "This is an unattractive city,/In its corner covered with smoke,/Like a spider's web in a cave,/Some people's lives are intertwined. /I just wrote it online,/I stumbled around looking for it: it's not this kind of worry,/it's that kind of empty hope, "(Alien) but in the poet Ren Hongyuan, we can only glimpse the image of survival at most. 1966' s terror only produced a lonely figure to visit the rooftop of Beijing Gugong Company (Under the Rooftop of Beijing Gugong Company), 1968. This is not to say that Ren Hongyuan turned a blind eye to the sufferings of reality, but because he was more accustomed to pushing the judgment of reality into the distance. Or get out of the tangle of real life, show the life he understands and call for his life ideal. In his own words, because "I don't want to kneel on the ground anymore", I always write poems in the sky [7]. At the same time, it is difficult for a poet who achieved literary enlightenment in the artistic conception of A Moonlit Night on a Spring River to show a decisive negative attitude towards traditional poetics. Especially after decades of isolation from the spirit of classical poetics after the founding of the People's Republic of China, poets like Ren Hongyuan are eager to learn from traditional poetics again. Compared with Mu Dan's radical "Westernization", they will definitely try to revive China's traditional spirit in modern times.
Of course, Ren Hongyuan, who was mature in the 1990s, also had deeper cultural thinking than the academic poets in the 1920s and 1930s. Wen Yiduo, Bian and others once talked about the blending of Chinese and western poetry art, which does not seem to fully represent the poet's choice of poetry, because the blending of Chinese and western poetry in the history of modern poetry is actually a "long-term tradition of deliberately connecting China's poetry without any worries", and finally returns to the tradition of China's classical poetics with the blending of Chinese and western poetry as a bridge.
Although Ren Hongyuan was also shaken by the reality: "When China poets broke away from their own classical traditions and focused on western romanticism and modernism, imagists from the west, such as Pound, fell in love with China's classical poetics and even regarded China's classical poetry as a tradition of their modernism." "In the unprecedented broad field of vision of contemporary China poets, the horizontal scanning is bound to intersect with the vertical scanning. So the modern discovery of China's classical poetry aesthetics began, just like rediscovering a lost world, which was surprising. " [9] However, Ren Hongyuan, who was overjoyed, was worried, because at the same time he really felt the great pressure from the same traditional culture: "We just wandered in the literature of our predecessors. The more intoxicated we are, the farther away we are from the truth of nature and the truth of life itself. " [8] In his view, Xiang Yu's Wujiang suicide is the last glory of traditional China people's life. "Our life is beginning to age", and the poetic achievements of predecessors are precisely the trap of today's people. "After Qu Yuan picked up the sunset in Kunlun, it is difficult for you to have your own sunrise. After Zhuangzi released his Kunpeng, it's hard for you to have your own sky and soar. It is difficult for you to become a mountain under Confucius' Mount Tai. Li Bai's Yellow River and Su Shi's Yangtze River make it difficult for you to become water. When the chrysanthemums in the Jin Dynasty opened, your flower of life withered. " [8] Obviously, this cultural burden-bearing experience comes from Ren Hongyuan's historical self-restraint as a scholar. It is a scholar's reserve of historical wealth that keeps him away from the poet's pure pride, thus making him more cautious, more calm and more relaxed. Unlike his friend He Jiang, a poet, who indulged in ancient dreams defenseless, Ren Hongyuan repeatedly questioned with suspicion: "Going back to ancient times in the East is always an adventure for the soul of modern people. Perhaps, the river itself is not clear, and what he has achieved is a kind of tranquility beyond conflict and solemnity overlooking suffering? Or drown the stillness and silence of the impulse of modern life? " [9] In this way, in the so-called blending of China and the West, "returning to the East" still cannot represent the voice of Ren Hongyuan. This can be regarded as the difference of ideas between academic poets due to the movement of the times and the development of knowledge, although they are all using the way of thinking of confrontation between China and the West.
"double transcendence"
Since Ren Hongyuan will not ignore the contradiction between Chinese and Western poetics because he is eager to create, nor is he a stubborn and exclusive person, and he is full of doubts about the simple "return to the East", but it is impossible to completely deny the tradition of taking the road of "Westernization", how can he analyze the poetic problems standing in the hearts of academic poets? In my opinion, Ren Hongyuan's new strategy is to give consideration to both aspects and double transcendence. Specifically, it is to keep an open attitude towards the west, not be limited by the west, criticize its own historical traditions, and try to explore them. He described in poetic language that this is the impact of the Yangtze River and the Pacific Ocean, and it should be the new shore of the mainland. "Behind it is the source and flow of the Yangtze River for thousands of years, and in front is the mighty Pacific Ocean. With the impact of rivers and seas, the tide of contemporary poetry in China is expected to achieve the double transcendence of western modernism and oriental classical poetics. " [9]
Ren Hongyuan from Turgenev, Pushkin, lermontov, Whitman, to Pound, Egri, Eliot. It is worth noting that "retrieving the long-lost image of Tang poetry from Pound, recognizing the tradition from Egri Tis and returning to the East" confirms Zhuangzi's "instant eternity" in Eliot's A Coexisting Order [6]. It is these western poets (especially modern western poets) who pushed Ren Hongyuan to the maturity of poetry, and this opposite maturity itself shows that he is never willing to be at the mercy of any western visitors. "I took a quick look at Pound, and hurried back for fear of losing it again." "Walking into other people's wasteland, I can't escape my own desolation." He even boldly questioned, "Is the poet exhausted from Eliot? Otherwise, how can modern poets so easily abandon the spirituality of poetry to philosophy and strive to raise the speculative weight that philosophy has long wanted to put down? " [6] Looking at the poems published by Ren Hongyuan, we can see that most of the images are not from the west, but from China culture itself. Wang Wei's sunset, Zhuangzi's butterfly, Tao Qian's chrysanthemum, Li Bai's moon, seal script, official script, regular script, weeds and other ancient characters, Sima Qian and his men and women, Nu Wa who filled the sky, and Xingtian who was beheaded are obviously derived from it. At this time, even the occasional flash of western images (the Sphinx, Prometheus) was submerged in the image of China in the sea of Wang Yang, which became an explanation of China's cultural landscape:
sphinx
Standing by the pyramids along the Nile.
Ask the world
Eternal mystery
Eternal question
I answered
I answered with a mended day.
I use thousands of life forms formed by loess to solve the problem.
-nuwa 1 1 video
Nu Wa explained "man" intuitively with her magnificent life creation, and Sphinx's philosophical thinking added the cultural significance of oriental practice. This is a transcendence of western poetics.
Ren Hongyuan's rebellion against China's traditional culture is also well known. In a sense, "anti-culture" is an inevitable trend for him to get rid of the historical burden. "In this land, the dilemma of our survival is not whether we can enter history, but whether we can enter history." [8] However, he clearly distinguished himself from the "counter-culture" of the third generation of poets: "Man is a" cultural animal "after all. Life without culture and culture without life do not belong to human nature. Isn't real poetry a life that rises to culture, a culture that turns into life? " [9] That is to say, what Ren Hongyuan wants to rebel is not the culture itself, but to activate (or create) new life and new culture by opening the old tradition.