LEO LEE
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fact pins his poetic metaphor on the Yangtze River (it could be any
river in China), he is not alone in seeing around him a darkened
landscape . In fact, Chinese geographical names and famous
historical sites are evoked frequently in the works of other poets: not
only the Yangtze River and the Great Wall but also the Tianmen
Square and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, the ancient Tang
dynasty pagoda in Xi'an, the martyrs' mound near Canton for the
anti-Manchu revolutionaries of an earlier era. But the splendor and
glory of a past China (typical of so many patriotic works) is gone; in–
stead , these familiar sites are turned into metaphors of ruin and
despair on which the poet searches for an uncertain hope. Three
lines from a poem by Yang Lian sum up clearly this orientation:
I come to these ruins
Chasing after the only hope that once shone on me
That untimely, fragile star
But are these poems "obscure," as conservative cntics have
argued? Rather, they spring, perhaps too transparently, from the
texture of life and feeling which the young poets wish to make more
"real" and authentic than the roseate socialist reality portrayed in
countless works of revolutionary literature in the past. To be sure,
this type of poetry has depicted a shattered reality which no longer
conforms to Mao's ideological vision.
(It
also makes an interesting
contrast to Mao's own evocations of northern Chinese landscape in
his famous poem, "Snow," in which grandiose mountains and rivers
bespeak the poet's supreme ambition to be a truly heroic leader un–
precedented in Chinese history.) Thus despite raging counter–
attacks, a number of scholars and critics both inside China (Xie
Mian, Xu Jingya, Sun Shaozhen) and abroad have professed sym–
pathy for this "thinking generation"; some even proclaim that this
surge of new poetry is already effecting a "revolution" in poetry
writing and poetics: there has never been anything like it in the past
thirty years.
In my view, both the praise and the blame tend to be ex–
travagant . As novice innovators these young poets are still at a stage
of "capturing instantaneous impressions" (in Bei Dao's words) and
learning to realize the artistic capacities of poetry in order to do
justice to the full range of their feelings and experiences. But as they
begin their quest for larger questions and themes, their works may
also become more mature . The poet Yang Lian has recently received
