Yu Dafu, Xu Zhimo's classmate, has made more achievements in the creation of ancient poems than novels, while Xu Zhimo is famous for his creation of new poems. His first book of poems, Poems of Zhimo, is another monument after Goddess by Guo Moruo. Guo Moruo's poems are magnificent, while Xu Zhimo's poems are elegant, smart, beautiful and feminine. This is because of the differences in life experience and thoughts and feelings, and also because Guo Moruo pays attention to the grandeur and intensity of the theme, and Xu Zhimo is committed to the placement of forms and the coordination of colors.
Liang Shiqiu believes that Xu Zhimo's poetry creation originated from the study of English poetry. Xu Zhimo created the rhythm of foreign poetry in Chinese and put it into foreign poetry. There are some English poets Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley and Hardy in Xu Zhimo's poems. Baudelaire in France, Whitman in the United States and Tagore in India are also foreign professors of Xu Zhimo. These people broadened Xu Zhimo's horizons, learned to express his feelings, and also let Xu Zhimo transplant flowers to China in the form of foreign poems.
Pinyin characters are very different from China characters, and the musical beauty of European and American poems is very different from China's ancient poems in tone and rhyme. In the aspect of rhyme, Xu Zhimo made a bold attempt to rhyme, cross rhyme and embrace rhyme in foreign poems. In addition, he moved back to China in the form of three-style rhyme, double-span rhyme, parallel rhyme, chapter rhyme, four-sentence rhyme, six-sentence rhyme and even-odd rhyme. Before Xu Zhimo, I'm afraid no one had done so many experiments. Therefore, Mr. Zhu Ziqing praised him: Mr. Xu has experimented with various foreign poetic styles, and his talent is enough to master these forms, so he has made great achievements.
Xu Zhimo once said, "We realize that poetry is art". As the highest art, poetry has to absorb the tone and rhythm of music. Xu Zhimo's understanding of syllables is to seek the matching of syllables on the basis of poetic sentiment and poetry, so as to obtain the perfect harmony between rhythm change and emotional ups and downs.
The melody of poetry is another kind of musical beauty. Please read Shiana La-For Japanese Girls written by Xu Zhimo during Tagore's visit to Japan:
The most is the gentleness of that bow.
Like a lotus flower, I am too ashamed to enjoy the cold.
Take care of yourself, take care of yourself.
There is sweet sadness in the treasure-
Shian Nala
This poem uses the different lengths of poems to form uneven hierarchical effects, expresses subtle and complicated emotions with staggered rhymes, and forms a sense of rhythm with overlapping words and sentences. This poem is short and sentimental, singing three sighs and lingering, which makes people tireless and feels like a god. This is the contribution of melody.
There is no lack of painting beauty in Xu Zhimo's poems. Although it is not as full of Zen as Wang Wei's poems with pictures and poems, it can also depict beautiful artistic conception and shape beautiful images in the poems. I have a love, Lei Feng film under the moon, and the happiness of snowflakes are all such works. This is the effect of rhetoric and the necessity of the situation. Poetry is something to love, but it can't be separated from the realm of love, no matter what poetry is. Empty, moaning and shouting poems are by no means good poems. Xu Zhimo knows this well, so there are both descriptive images, figurative images and symbolic images in his poems. These romantic images originated from imagination are novel and unique, which produces the unique artistic charm of poetic and painting beauty.
The architectural beauty of poetry is Wen Yiduo's third discovery of the beauty of poetry. The poems in Xu Zhimo's later poetry collections were greatly influenced by Wen Yiduo, and the sentences were more neat, the rhythm was more lively and the meter was more exquisite. Later, Xu Zhimo showed Wen Yiduo his poetry collection Cold Jade Night, which Wen Yiduo said was "a great progress". The architectural beauty of poetry mainly comes from visual aspects, including the unity of knots and sentences. Wen Yiduo's poems are mostly neat, sometimes like tofu, and return to the old road of ancient poetry. Xu Zhimo has long noticed the uniformity in Zhimo's poems, but he does not insist on uniformity, but can make the poems stretch more naturally.
Xu Zhimo's experiment in the form of new poetry is admirable. He not only tried to introduce foreign poems, but also wrote philosophical poems, prose poems and even oral poems in Beijing dialect or Zhejiang Shi Xia dialect. His poems are both metrical and freestyle; There are not only songs, but also dialogues. There are not only lyrical styles, but also narrative styles. However, it is unfair to arbitrarily say that Xu Zhimo's poems are a hodgepodge of formalism. Although his last two poems are perfect in form and vague in content, if it is not "Cold Jade Night" praising love, it is better to look at this poem of Zhimo, which is idealistic and humanitarian, and takes up the sincerity and carefree of the poem.
Xu Zhimo is known as "the philosopher of poetry", and his poem "generate gives birth to bones, generate gives birth to blood, generate gives birth to soul, and generate gives birth to life". Some contemporary poets joke about Xu Zhimo's petty bourgeoisie, aestheticism and naivety, while others regard his emotional entanglements with several women as talk after dinner. I was surprised at his unusual fall from the sky. Xu Zhimo has "that kind of desperate and intense burning passion" and dares to explore in the mountains of poetic formalism. Even now, poets are lost in the poetry of various schools in Europe and America. For Xu Zhimo, we don't need to be too demanding, but we need to learn from and reflect. After all, Zhimo's poetry got rid of the loose structure and loose sentences in the early stage of new poetry, which brought us a fresh wind and made new poetry embark on a new milestone.