ABSTRACT
Poetry occupied a privileged position in China's cultural production throughout the centuries. From the very dawn through the dusk of the empire, it closely followed and echoed, but also, by reflecting on, and resonating with, its major events, actively regulated the pulse of Chinese history as the mandate of heaven was passing from one dynasty to another. Like the country itself, it was evolving and often quite radically so, but always within some tacitly assumed and acknowledged higher order that guaranteed its essential continuity. Accordingly, the “twin themes of [sociopolitical] crisis and [cultural and literary] innovation” (Wang and Wei 2005, 1) represent an important trope in scholarship on the continuities and transformations in Chinese culture since the mid-sixteenth century, if not much earlier (Tian 2017). Literary scholars have showed that paradigm shifts in culture often coincided with the breakdown of the reigning political order, resulting, for example, in the emergence of new poetic modes of expression, such as writing by women on their experience of historical disruption that accompanied the troubled Ming-Qing transition (Chang 2005, 506). Not surprisingly, when the dynastic rule collapsed in the period of the sociopolitical transformations that accompanied the hatching out of the republic at the turn of the twentieth century, late Qing intellectuals simultaneously initiated the quest for a lyrical voice that would adequately intonate Chinese modernity. Authors of the “New Poetry” (xinshi 新诗) successfully challenged the premodern canon with their verse, in which they experimented with hybrid poetic forms inspired by world literary trends. These texts were no less important than the colloquial short story for the literary articulation of the modernization movement of May Fourth, 1919, which reflected the determination of progressive intellectuals to leave behind not only the shackles of the old regime, but also what they saw as shackles of the ancient poetic conventions.
