Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman

Whitman’s Soul in China: Guo Moruo’s Poetry in the New Culture Movement

Whitman’s Soul in China Guo Moruo’s Poetry in the New Culture Movement liu rongqiang
Guo Moruo (1892–1978) was a celebrated and well-established Chinese poet, playwright, literary critic, historian, and paleographer. In literature, he was particularly well known for his first poetry collection, The Goddesses, published in 1921 and a landmark in the history of modern Chinese poetry . The collection contains a prologue and three main parts: three poetic dramas as part one, thirty poems as part two, and twenty-three poems as part three. All these pieces were written in the years 1916 –1921, when Guo Moruo was an overseas student in Japan, and quite a few of the poems , especially the vigorous ones in part two, were written under Walt Whitman’s influence. This essay examines Guo Moruo’s poetic debt to Whitman during the New Culture Movement in the second decade of the twentieth century. I will discuss the main factors that prompted Guo Moruo to follow Whitman as a poetic guide, his creative use of Whitman’s themes and techniques, and the significance of his poetry to the New Culture Movement.
During the New Culture Movement, Guo Moruo was deeply indebted to Whitman. If it were not for Whitman, Guo might not have become a leading poet and might not have written his vigorous and democratic poems at that time. As to Whitman’s influence, he frankly admitted: “It was Whitman whomademecrazyaboutwritingpoems.ItwasintheyearwhentheMay4th Movement broke out that I first touched his Leaves of Grass. Reading his poems, I came to see what to write and how to voice my personal troubles and the nation’s sufferings. His poems almost made me mad. . . . Thus, it was possible for me to have the first poetry collectionThe Goddesses published.”1 A combination of factors prompted Guo Moruo to follow Whitman’s poetic example. When Guo was studying in Japan, he became extremely interested in reading and imitating foreign poems written in or translated into Japanese, German, and/or English.2 In fact, it was in Japan rather than in China that he became an ambitious and radical poet, for there it was possible for him to read foreign poems widely and free himself from the fetters of classical Chinese poetry and traditional Chinese culture that he had been exposed to from his childhood in China. Before reading Whitman, he had already read a great deal of work by other foreign poets. In particular, he had been interested in Rabindranath Tagore’s and Heinrich Heine’s poems. Following their lead, he wrote some of the earliest Chinese vernacular poems, like “The Crescent Moon and White Clouds,” “The Attraction of Death,” “Parting,” “Venus,” “Egret,” “The Crescent Moon and the Clean Sea,” and “Worry in Spring.”3 He first got to know Whitman by reading the Japanese critic Arijima Buro’s book The Rebels, in which Whitman is described as a democratic poet. In addition, commemorative activities were held in honor of Whitman’s 100th birthday in Japan in 1919 (Dangbo 85–86), and they helped intensify Guo Moruo’s interest in the American poet and his poems. He enjoyed reading Whitman and naturally followed him in writing poems. Because of his strong interest in pantheism, Guo Moruo was especially delighted with Leaves of Grass. He had been reading works with pantheistic thoughts from 1915 to 1919, including poems by Tagore and Kabir as well as the Upanishads. Meanwhile, he was immersed in The Complete Works of Wang Yangming, a Chinese philosopher whose thoughts were typical of traditional Chinese pantheists. While reading Goethe in 1917, he became interested in Spinoza’s works (Dangbo 66). Pantheism played an increasingly important role in shaping his own thought. He came to believe that “everything that exists is nothing but a self-expression of God. The ego is nothing but a self-expression of God’s nature. Hence, the ego is God and everything that exists is but the self-expression of the ego. . . . Everything that exists will die. That’s the nature of the universe.”4 Discovering pantheistic ideas in Leaves of Grass, he became more and more interested in Whitman. What attracted him were lines like “all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any” (LG 23), or “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren” (LG 59...