New poetry is also called vernacular poetry, new vernacular poetry, modern poetry, and free verse.
Form: The format can be roughly divided into three categories: line poetry, segmented poetry and image poetry. Among them, line poetry is the most popular and has the most works.
The format can be roughly divided into three categories: line poetry, segmented poetry and image poetry. Among them, line poetry is the most popular and has the most works.
1. Line poetry
New poetry lines are influenced by Western literature and are sometimes ridiculed as "prose lines". Line poetry developed into two major branches: free verse and metrical poetry.
1. Free verse
The name "free verse" comes from the French "vers libre". It is characterized by no fixed structure and fixed rhythm, and can use rhyme flexibly. It must rhyme, but the reading also requires a sense of rhythm and music. Free verse takes "content determines form" as the highest principle; it includes various formal elements such as rhythm and rhyme, punctuation, number of words, lines and paragraphs, etc., all of which are determined by the theme and content of the poem.
Form must be sacrificed for content; poets do not need to strictly follow any writing conventions and norms that appeal to the beauty of surface form, everything is based on the needs of the theme to express content. In other words, if the subject content of the creation requires it, free verse can also use metrical syntax arbitrarily.
2. Rhymed Poetry
Metrical poetry has its own set of rules that can be repeated to determine the number of lines, number of paragraphs, meter, and rhyme principles. The number of words in each sentence, the number of lines in each stanza, and the syllables are all more regular, as well as rhyming; poets sometimes set their own metrical rules for poems to create the beauty of music, painting, and architecture in the poem.
The two major characteristics of metrical poetry are visual beauty and auditory beauty. Metrical poets pay attention to the "proportion of stanzas" in lines and the "evenness of sentences" in paragraphs, requiring a symmetrical and harmonious relationship between lines. In each paragraph, there are at least two lines of syllables with symmetrical numbers, which creates a strong sense of rhythm when read.
Metricalists believe that the reason poetry can stimulate emotions lies entirely in its rhythm, so meter is rhythm. Many metrical poems have four lines in each stanza and the same number of words in each line. They appear to be square and square, and are nicknamed "dried tofu poems".
Rhyme poetry was a form commonly used by the Crescent School after 1928. Famous poets include Wen Yiduo, Xu Zhimo, Bian Zhilin, Liang Zongdai, Wu Xinghua, etc., but they failed to become mainstream. After the 1940s, their works gradually reduce. Many themes in modern society mostly belong to the tone of free verse, and the themes of metrical poetry are relatively rare. In the 1950s, they were greatly disparaged by the modernists in Taiwan, and they have never recovered since then.
2. Paragraphed Poems
The new poems in the early period followed the unlined form of the old poems and were divided into sections but not lines. After the New Literature Movement, when poets translated Western literature, they translated many prose poems, such as the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Turgenev, which attracted imitation.
There are not many writers of segmented poems. Early poets include Lu Xun, Zhu Ziqing, Xu Zhimo, etc. After the war, only Ji Xian and Shang Qin often wrote segmented poems. There are not many excellent works of early segmented poetry, and they are often loosely structured, like prose. After passing through the early stage of development, there were not many poets who continued to devote themselves to the creation of segmented poetry, and segmented poetry gradually declined.
3. Image poetry
Image poetry, or concrete poetry, is a poem arranged into images or images, and the graphics and content cooperate with each other. In Western literature, George Herbert's image poetry is very famous. The creation of image poetry often has great limitations.
Techniques
1 Study old poems
Some new poems are derived from old poems in form. For example, some of Wu Xinghua’s new poems are derived from Qijue and Wuyan ancient poems. They are very Readable.
2. Learning Western Poetry
Many poets have introduced a certain form, genre, or work of a certain poet in an attempt to bring Western poetry to China. This approach sometimes ignores the special properties, structure and phonology of Chinese, and rarely produces good works.
For example, the most important genre in British poetry, "blank verse", is difficult to transplant. Xu Zhimo's "A Night in the Emerald Green" and Wen Yiduo's "The Death of Li Bai" , are all immature attempts.
There are also occasional successful works that imitate Western poetry. Dai Wangshu's imitations of modern French poets, especially Jemai's works, are worth reading. Wu Xinghua wrote new poems by imitating various Western poetic styles, including blank verse, sonnet, Spencer style, ballad, narrative epic, etc., and achieved remarkable results.