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 he always shows his innovation in rebellion and heterogeneity against traditions (including those formed in the 1920s and 1930s). Among the nine-leaf poets, Mu Dan was undoubtedly the one who deeply embodied the modern exploration of new poetry in the 1940s. With profound and complicated connotations, full inner passion and skillful and complicated skills, his poems have raised 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. The main collections of poems are Expedition (1945), Mu Dan Poetry (1947) and Qi (1945).
Mu Dan's poetry creation began in 1930s, when he was a high school student in Nankai School in Tianjin. At that time, as a teenager, he had shown the characteristics of precocity and precocity. In his poems, he expressed his concern about realistic suffering and his exploration of life philosophy and the mysteries of the universe. From 65438 to 0935, Mu Dan was admitted to Tsinghua. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, he came to Kunming with his school, entered the National Southwest Associated University, and began to show his unique poetic talent. He first came into contact with English romantic poets, and his writings were 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,/I was as melancholy as grass,/I was young with red patterns." At that time, Mu Dan wrote "Shelley's romantic poetry, which has a strong lyrical temperament, but also vented his dissatisfaction with reality." But in these romantic and lyrical works, they show a strong sense of life and modern skepticism.
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. The poem On the Wilderness makes an amazing self-analysis: "I shouted from the wilderness of my heart,/for the beautiful truth I glimpsed,/and unfortunately, the days of hesitation will no longer exist,/when I hanged my wrong childhood." The poet's rational consciousness has been highlighted from the simple emotional expression and was enthusiastically 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 turned his attention to the grand and chaotic historical scenes around him. Tang Qi, another poet with nine leaves, once said: "Mu Dan wandered between romanticism and modernism in his early days, but the time was short. When he was in the early1940s, he quickly established his own modern poetic style based on modernism. "
In the 1940s, Mu Dan's creation entered a mature stage. His poetic skills are exquisite, and he skillfully uses modern poetic skills such as irony, symbolism, dramatic scenes, multi-voice monologues, collage, parody, etc., and successfully integrates his own experience of historical reality and personal spirit into amazing poetic imagination, which leads to a metaphysical inquiry into the whole history and life. He also became "the most popular young poet at that time", and his poems "had a strong response". 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. This shows that Mu Dan was in an 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 refined and summarized. Therefore, the induction here is also to facilitate discussion and grasp. When reading a poem, be careful not to make excessive division.
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 poetry. Nine-leaf poets are still seeking the organic unity of society and individual, utility and art, times and self, which is the starting point of Mu Dan's poetry. 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 standing on the bridge between reality and dreams kept trying to "find other people's dreams", but finally he said, "I want to go to the station and take the 1940 bus to the hottest furnace". 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 in this era, no matter in the streets, fields and towns," people will be heard singing loudly ",and Mu Dan is here. However, unlike those simple and empty political lyrics during the Anti-Japanese War, his "praise" did not stop at the level of emotional catharsis, which contained a deeper sense of national hardship, nor did it hide his special and painful voice: "I want to hug you with everything, you,/people I see everywhere,/people living in shame, people with rickets,/I want to share with you with blood-stained hands. /Because a nation has risen. "
In this poem entitled "Praise", "man" is not beautified or heroized, but is 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: "On a cold night in December, the wind swept across the northern plain,/the fields in the north dried up, and barley and millet had pushed into the village. /…/On the ancient road, a light flashed across the vertical and horizontal fields,/a pair of heavy and striped ones. What does he do? /On the way to this dumb 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 undertake the falling of snowflakes." Objectively and moderately, such a poem not only conveys a certain sense of the whole times, but also flashes the poet's profound sense of hardship.
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 best expression of the almost cold consciousness of modern intellectuals". In his works, the absurdity behind reality and the spiritual distortion experienced by individuals in history have been revealed. In the poem "Parting", he wrote ... Oh, my God. Let's go back and forth in the tunnel of canine teeth, and let us believe that the disorder of your sentence is the same. We converted,/you gave us a lot, and a lot of pain. "
In this poem, "God", "history" and "truth" all become negative and heterogeneous beings. Deception leads "us" and adds richness and pain in the disharmonious conflict. It can be said that "the pain of wealth" expresses a holistic view of world life, which has become a potential core theme of Mu Dan's poets.
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 team shouts,/No one will see it/... Stupid people will jump into the mire,/And the murderer will sing the song of freedom in May,/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 down inner conflicts and struggles with a thoughtful and sensitive attitude is another embodiment of modern consciousness in Mu Dan's poems. From Emptiness to Enrichment describes the course of an intellectual's struggle, disillusionment and rebirth under the grand war and trivial daily background. Through the switching of various characters and scenes, the reader is exposed to the complex flow of the hero'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 gains and losses." This painful and contradictory experience even extends to the deepest personal feelings, and his famous poem Eight Poems is a representative. When dealing with the romantic themes of countless poets, this poem adopts an objective cold treatment, discusses the fiery obsession of love, and probes into separation and alienation, which leads the poet to guess love painfully in the variation of "seeking wealth and danger"
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 the expression of "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 capital letters, and "I" is complete and heroic. Guo Moruo's poem "My I'm about to explode" expresses this romantic self-awareness. On the other hand, in modern poets like Mu Dan, "self" is put back into the squeeze of reality and spirit, and the complicated, 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 again and again, "I want to rush out of the wall and embrace myself with my hands." 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 "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 "self-reliance". The Seduction of Snakes is based on the religious story that "people are seduced by snakes and driven out of the Garden of Eden by God after eating the fruit of wisdom". It describes a young man's psychological feeling of weakness and hesitation in modern life. The alternation of external environment description and inner monologue reminds people of Eliot's famous poem "Love Song of Prolock". "I'm still alive? 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 will 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 whether it is personal speculation or historical action, "new combination" is often replaced by "new division". In the crowd, in the chorus of the times, he heard "collective joy, but at the same time he found" hooligans, liars and bandits walking together in the chaotic streets "(May), and in the experience of love, he also heard the" Lord "snigger" constantly adding other you and me/making us extremely rich "(eight songs). Under the heavy pressure of history, "an ordinary person includes countless assassinations and countless delays." (Complaint) Mu Dan's complex self-consciousness seems to be unable to be calm in any real object, and he can only resort to an ultimate existence that transcends real history and nature. Only in a silence similar to religious sense can he return to the original state: "It's time, this is our distorted life/please say it, this is our tired public heart/please be gentle,/Lord, the source of hungry life, let us hear it."
"A nation has risen", "the pain of wealth" and "incomplete me" all constitute 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 the possible depth that a modern China intellectual can reach in the face of history, reality and individual existence.
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. However, 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 into three innovative points, or three aspects that best reflect the poet's artistic personality.
The first is the structure of dramatic tension.
In exploring the modernity of new poetry, the Nine Leaves Poetry School 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 the nine-leaf poetry school". However, compared with the beauty of images in Xin Di's poems and the humorous irony that can be seen everywhere in Du Fu's and Yuan Kejia's poems, Mu Dan's personal style in his poems is remarkable, 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, and thought 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 dramatic proposition of kuya's new poetry school. Yuan Kejia believes: "Poetry is a model that is finally presented 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 long poems, such as Lyric in Air-raid Shelter, From Emptiness to Enrichment, Ghost-to-Ghost Debate and so on. 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 Air-raid Shelter are carried out in the dialogue between "I" and "He". On the surface, daily topics constantly interfere with the theme of the poem, but it is in the contrast between war and gossip that the true mentality of the individual can be restored under the impact of history.
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: "In May, flowers bloom and fall/cuckoos wander to make people busy/everything grows high and clouds are pale/the prodigal son travels far and misses his hometown."
After such an antique ballad, the poetic style suddenly changed: "Browning, Mao Se, Portable No.3". /or a revolver that bursts into human flesh,/they give 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 times" formed a "sudden contrast". Through this dramatic juxtaposition and ironic effect, the poet's profound understanding of historical reality was expressed.
Mu Dan's words in his poems and the way of developing his lines are also permeated with the sense of "tension" everywhere. After reading his poems, readers will find that he likes to write from the place of opposition and contradiction, and through the contest of two opposing forces, he forms a tortuous and in-depth expressive force of his poems. For example: "In the darkness between the past and the future, the earth, thoughts and glory are lifted up with the eternal/present." (Thoughts on 30th birthday) "We have too many interests, divisions, conspiracies and revenge/all of which push us to the opposite extreme,/we should suddenly turn around and see you" (looming) "His pain is constantly seeking.
Order, obtained and must be deviated. "("Eight Poems ")
Stimulating poetic imagination in the "opposite extremes" not only forms the "tension" effect, but also effectively expands the meaning space of poetry. This is the so-called "complexity of thinking and linear grouping of emotions", 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 get involved in this complicated entanglement. Only by grasping its "tension" poetic art can we interpret its meaning and appreciate its special poetic beauty.
Mu Dan once said: "Poetry should be written about' amazing at the end of discovery'", that is, to write about unique experiences that no one has ever had before. Through the application of 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 a common feature of Jiuye Poetry School. In addition to expressing the thinking about life and the connotation of philosophical mysteries in poetry, it also refers to a unique modern poetry skill: perceptual thinking, that is, perceptual images are not used as symbols and metaphors of rational speculation, but intellectual content is directly turned into perceptual objects, as the modernist poet Eliot described: smelling thoughts like roses. This technique is transformed into a more specific and personal way in Mu Dan's poems: thinking with the body.
Mu Dan's poems contain many thoughts, many of which are even similar to abstract speculation. But such poems can arouse readers' strong sense of * * *, 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, even your farthest world:/My skin has given me heartfelt piety." (Discovery) "... Ah, this bustling place/full of ambition for young blood/a tired cold wind blowing between its pillars" (Poetry) "The place where your hand touches my foot is a meadow,/where there is its stubbornness, I am surprised." (eight poems)
The above poems are full of bold whimsy, and 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 and emotional thread" has a special poetic beauty effect. Tang Tao pointed out, "Mu Dan may be one of the few lyric poets in China who can think for himself, feel for himself and give profound life to everything, and also seems to be one of the few lyric poets with perceptual feelings and thoughts in China." "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 lit, but there is nowhere to go." Oh, light, shadow, sound and color are all naked,/painful, waiting for a new combination. "
Here, light, shadow, sound, color and various elements of nature 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 one 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 "love affair" in poetry creation and advocates taking special modern experience as the object of expression. He tried to achieve fresh and unique poetry by pursuing "non-poetry". He believes that the main difference between China's poetry and western poetry (modern poetry) lies in: "Do you want to treat romantic poetry as poetry? Can modern life be the source of poetic images? "
Since its appearance, new poetry has broken the shackles of the external form of old poetry, but the aesthetic ideal of "thinking and environment coexist" in classical poetry 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. However, in Mudan District, this sentiment was consciously resisted. In his poems, readers seldom see the poetic realm of destroyer Feng Hua Xuefeng, and more are materialized and heterogeneous modern experiences. In his early poem "Reduction" written by modern methods, ugly words such as "pig in the sludge" appeared. In his own words, "this poem was written in' non-poetic' words." In other poems, "non-poetic" phrases such as Browning, musket, inflation, industrial pollution, dialectical materialism and power center are widely used, which are full of turbulent modern flavor, which greatly alienates the mellow orientation of classical poetry.
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 goal of classical poetry is balance, harmony and the blending of subject and object, and the ideal of poetry is the realm without trace. But in Mu Dan's case, the application of tension principle broke the "beauty of neutralization", which caused crises and cracks between me and things, between me and the world, and between me and others, forming another "beauty of tension".
In language, Mu Dan also showed a rebellious attitude of "non-poetic" and liberated new poetry from the narrowness of closed "poetic language". There has been a lot of debate about whether new poetry is "prose" or "purely poetic". An important idea of "pure poeticization" is to regard poetry as a special language, away from everyday straightforward spoken language. In concrete practice, the particularity of poetic language is often manifested in the typical use of words, the implication of poetic context, the implication of language and so on. , forming a subtle and mellow 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 logically related words and Europeanized syntax as the backbone of his poems, forming a rational reasoning force: "Although they are dead now,/Although they have never lived,/They left an immortal memory,/When we begged for our lives,/They were in the dust that constituted us." (mouse hole)
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 connotation of poetry is intertwined, which is in sharp contrast with the gentle and soothing syntax of poets in the 1930 s. Mu Dan also has his own characteristics 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 concept words, such as "despair", "history", "temptation" and "logic", which form a defamiliarization effect in the combination of these words.
"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 feeling that they are too dense, too conceptual and even obscure. But as Tang Tao said, "There are few emotional lyricism and graceful charm in his poems that China people are used to, so people don't like it easily, but once they are unfamiliar and boring, they will give people great surprises and even admiration."
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".