Poetry
志摩的詩
Not translated into English
Xu Zhimo · 1925
Synopsis
Fifty-five poems according to The Paper, which says the book opens on the weakness of the world and closes on Cambridge. The forms vary: long lines close to prose and heavy with repetitions, as in the poem of the grey life or that of the poison, short lyrical pieces, and the song of the happy snowflake, carried by its refrain “fly, fly, fly”, according to Aisixiang. The critic Zhu Xiang distinguished five families in it: prose poems, poems in a popular vein, philosophical poems, love poems and miscellaneous pieces.
Context
According to The Paper, Xu Zhimo had the book printed at his own expense in August 1925, in movable type and in a traditional binding, as the second title of a series of the Modern Society; sales began in Beijing in early September. It is the first of his four collections, according to Aisixiang and Britannica. Zhu Xiang, who admired its poetic prose, also noted in it dialectal rhymes and neglected parallelisms. Renditions reports that the author had drawn on Shelley and Byron, as well as on the French Romantics and Symbolists. The collection has been translated neither into French nor into English.
Who it is for
Poems to be taken separately; with no French version, the reader will turn to the selections of the author's poems published in English.
Prizes and reception
Aisixiang judges that these pieces, though not all free of flaws, express the turmoil of an ardent youth.
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