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Xu Zhimo (1895-1931)
I. Biography:
-grew up in Zhejiang and studied at new style universities
including Beida
-married to Zhang Youyi (sister of Zhang Junmai and Zhang Jia'ao
who were friends of Xu Zhimo
-summer of 1918 he went to America; received a B.A. in history
from Clark U. (Mass) in 1919 and an M.A. in economics from Columbia
in 1920
-1921-22 was in England to study Politic Economics at Cambridge;
here he started writing poetry and read widely in British romantics
like Keats, Shelley
-abandons his wife, with whom he had had a non-relationship throughout
their marriage when she is pregnant with his second child; she
goes to Paris, then Germany, to live and study; they eventually
get divorced (considered one of the first divorces in modern
history) when Xu falls for Lin Huiyin, arranged to marry Liang
Qichao's son
-in 1922 he returned to China where he had a career in teaching
and writing
-joined the Crescent Moon society in 1923
-was Tagore's translator on his China tour of 1924
-Xu falls in love with Lu Xiaoman, already married to the Chief
of Police in Manchuria and they begin a tempestuous relationship
which eventually breaks off when she falls for a Peking Opera
star, named Weng
-chief editor of the poet supplement of Chenbao, which promoted
the new style vernacular poetry
-edited the Xinyue monthly in 1928, a conservative alternative
to the radicalization trend that was beginning to promote the
political uses of literature
-1931 dies in a plane crash
II. Poetry:
-new style poetry in the vernacular
-much of it free style, but also some working within poetic forms
-assertion of the "I" is explicit, whereas it was always
in traditional poetry suppressed and implicit
-as Hu Shi recognized, his poetry expresses the conflict between
the ideals of love, freedom and beauty and the world
-as Mao Dun wrote, his optimistic idealism of the early period
gives way to a more realistic pessimism in his later poems
-formally, he moved from "free verse" to more formal
metres
III. Essays and Letters:
-he and Lu Xiaoman published the letters they exchanged in
the mid-1920s and they were read avidly by readers
-wrote a famous essay on "Flying", because he frequently
took the plane from Beijing to Shanghai in the 1920's and 1930s
IV. Themes:
-love, energy, dynamism and the iconoclastic rejection of conventional morality