Xu Zhimo
(1897–1931), modern Chinese poet. Born in Zhejiang Province, Xu Zhimo studied law at Beijing University in 1917 before attending Columbia University in the United States and then Cambridge University in England. During his stay in England, he began to write poems under the influence of English Romantic poetry. After he came back to China in 1922, he formed a cultural organization called the Crescent Society with writer and reformist Hu Shi, scholar Zhang Junmai, and others in 1923. Their society was the origin of the Crescent poetry school, which was one of the most important literary schools of China in the twentieth century.
Deeply influenced by English Romantic poetry, Xu developed his own unique writing style. His poems are bright, graceful, and full of musicality, reflecting his love of nature with great enthusiasm. As a Romantic poet, he pursued beauty and love and dreamed of a poetic life. Xu also made a great contribution to modern Chinese poetry by developing a new poetic form. During the early decades of the twentieth century, modern Chinese poets made a persistent effort to break away from the shackles of the traditional poetic mode. In their eagerness to experiment with new forms and to achieve free expression, the new poets often disregarded meaning and formal beauty. Xu Zhimo and his colleagues corrected this. He paid much attention to the arrangement of the lines and to meter and rhyme. He and other poets of the Crescent school pursued regularity of form and harmony of rhyme. And they found the importance of poetic meter in modern Chinese poetry. Because of their effort in developing new forms of Chinese poetry, they had a wide influence in modern Chinese literature. Xu published three collections of poetry during his lifetime: Zhimo's Poems, One Night in Florence, and The Fierce Tiger. Many of his poems have become classics, such as "Farewell to Cambridge Again" and "Farewell to a Japanese Girl." In 1931, Xu died in an airplane crash when he was flying from Nanjing to Beijing.
Further Reading
Bian Zhilin. (1984) The Person and the Poetry. Beijing: Sanlian.
Leo Ou-Fan Lee. (1983) "Literary Trends: The Road to Revolution, 1927–1949." In The Cambridge History of China, edited by Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank. Vol 13. New York: Cambridge University Press, 421–491.
Lin, Julia. (1972) Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lu Yaodong. (1986) Critical Biography of Xu Zhimo. Xi'an, China: Shanxi People's Publishing House.
This is the complete article, containing 403 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
