The third generation of poetry has the following characteristics: it shows the tendency of anti-rationality, anti-loftiness and anti-hero, and advocates the consciousness of little people and civilians; Pay attention to genre and theoretical construction; A high sense of language in creation has expanded the development space of contemporary new poetry with spoken language. They liberated poetry from group consciousness, which made China's poetry present a trend of diversification, marginalization and individualization. The third generation of poetry is regarded as the watershed of China's contemporary poetry.
What is the third generation? Will there be the fourth and fifth generations after the third generation? Maybe, maybe not. When the third generation named it, it didn't think about the future.
According to Zhou Lunyou, the third generation is first and foremost a political concept.
To put it simply, "the third generation of poetry" is a self-conscious deformation behavior in avant-garde poetry with "misty poetry" as its direct rebellion and transcendence goal, and the aesthetic experience it conveys has the characteristics of modernity and post-modernity as a whole.
We need to summarize the overall aesthetic principles of the "third generation" in order to better grasp their text characteristics. Zhou Lunyou once wrote Poetics of the Third Generation for the third generation, which roughly summarized the aesthetic concept and writing tendency of the third generation: not sublime; Non-culture; Non-rhetoric; Non-image. They opposed the sublimity of the misty poetry school, overemphasized the poet's heroic tragedy consciousness, and set rediscovery and affirmation of human value as the theme of poetry. They try to remain indifferent to the sense of culture, try to avoid heavy cultural details and historical themes, and try to write poems in spoken English. They simplified the description of language and put forward metaphors of "synaesthesia" and "illogical rhetoric". They opposed metaphor and tried to eliminate the obscurity and tension of modern poetry.
Xu Jingya summed up the division of the "third generation" with the consciousness of dividing East and West, which is generally correct: one is the tendency of "China Poetry" represented by "holism" and "neo-traditionalism", and the other is the tendency of "postmodernism" represented by "non-modernism" and "them".
The poets of the former hold a stable attitude towards writing. They don't tend to deconstruct language, but try to explore the inherent divine factors of language itself. For example, the once published Modernism Fu represents the efforts of this school of poets.
Later poets maintained a strong distrust of the existing language order. For non-African poets, the purpose of their poetry writing is to systematically eliminate the poetic system polluted by ideology and the rigid "non-poetic" or "pseudo-poetic" world related to it, so as to recreate a poetic language system and related cultural system that is not polluted by ideology. Their writing emphasizes "zero-degree writing", tries to objectively describe the real world or life events, and tries to avoid excessive lyricism in misty poems.