How to understand the rebellion of Mu Dan's poetry creation

Mu Dan is a representative of the "Nine Leaves School" poets in the 1940s, and also a very successful one among modern poets. His works are praised as "the best expression of the cold consciousness of modern intellectuals" (Yuan Kejia's words). His familiarity with modern British and American poets, especially Ye Zhi, Eliot and Auden, his absorption of their poetic theory and critical theory, and his youthful vitality all make his poems have outstanding modern characteristics.

An important feature of modern poetry is that it emphasizes the inherent tension and drama of poetry, and often organizes a series of words and images full of confrontation and conflict to form an intricate, complex and strong lyric form. In Mu Dan's poems, we can find three groups of words with different colors. One is intense and dynamic: flame, swaying, longing, hugging, resisting, stretching, pushing and igniting; The second is static: green, land, overlooking, refuge; This is the opposition between grass and flowers, and the internal opposition of spring; It is also the opposition between "awakening" and "bewitch", and the opposition between the restless desire of adolescence and the image of the poet's meditation. "Window" is a medium, which separates and connects "desire" and "seeing", thus producing the third group of words that reflect tension: closed, curled and combined. These three groups of words interweave together to form the basic framework of poetry, and also. Compact and tense language; And full rhythm and concentrated pictures.

So, what is spring like? It is awakening, the first birth and rebirth, and the temptation of desire and addiction; It is a flying song and an open joy, but also a stagnant soil and a closed body; It is burning, dispersion, resistance, and a new combination and new rebirth after being dispersed. It is the natural spring, the youth of life, the budding of the poet's spring, and the generate of his poetic heart. The trinity of dawn, early spring and twenty-year-old youth, like the nakedness of light, shadow, sound and color and the openness of senses and thoughts, is waiting for the emergence of new combinations.

Mu Dan's poems are truly modern. The setting of metaphor and image makes his poems impossible to be as fluent as Xu Zhimo's, but more difficult to understand than Tang and Song poems in classical language. When Mu Dan's poems are difficult to read, it reminds people of Li He in the Tang Dynasty.