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Gu Cheng and Walt Whitman In Search of New Poetics liu shusen  None of the foreign poets introduced into China in the twentieth century is comparable to Walt Whitman with regard to his enthusiastic reception and far-reaching influence on the reading public, literary scholars, and writers, poets in particular. On the eve of the May 4th Movement in 1919, a nationwide campaign against Western political and economic aggression that called for a new democratic and antifeudal revolution, Whitman was introduced into China by Tian Han (1898–1968) and a few young poets who were among the earliest Marxist-influenced Chinese intellectuals. Tian Han is well known as the author of China’s national anthem, which he composed in 1935 after the Japanese invasion of the three northeast provinces of China in the early 1930s. While there are other possible sources of inspiration, Tian’s anthem seems to echo Leaves of Grass in its call for the united forces of an invaded people against foreign aggression and for a struggle to defend a nation’s identity and sovereignty. But long before Tian Han’s composition of the Chinese anthem, the Chinese poet Guo Moruo (1892–1978) was a pioneer in adopting Whitman as a model for writing so-called new vernacular verse or Chinese free verse in the 1910s and the 1920s. As one of the leading Chinese intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, Guo Moruo created innovative poems with patriotic and political themes, some of which were ardently received as a culturally domesticated Chinese version of Leaves of Grass. It is commonly recognized in China’s critical circles that Guo Moruo contributes most to Whitman’s reception among Chinese readers, or, in other words, Whitman’s reception and influence in China in the first half of the twentieth century result from Guo Moruo’s Whitman-mediated poems . As for Chinese translated texts of Leaves of Grass, Chu Tunan’s Selected Poems from “Leaves of Grass” is undoubtedly the most popular. First published in 1949, by the 1990s nearly half a million copies in ten printings had appeared. A quick search of the title catalogs of the six main libraries in China shows that there are more than sixteen Chinese versions of Whitman ’s poetry published from 1949 to 2000, of which two are complete versions of Leaves of Grass. Such facts may help us visualize a history of Whitman ’s general reception in China in the last century and set the stage for my examination of Whitman’s impact on a more recent poet. Any discussion of Whitman’s influence in China in the second half of the twentieth century would be incomplete without including the poet Gu Cheng (1956 –1993). Judged by his own comments on his work, Gu Cheng is undoubtedly the poet whose indebtedness to Whitman is the greatest among his Chinese peers. Gu Cheng traces his first reading of Whitman to his adolescence in the 1960s, but he claimed that the dynamic impact of Leaves of Grass never really hit him until 1983, when he was in search of a new poetics. While Whitman influenced Guo Moruo and other influential Chinese poets before the 1950s in stylistic and political ways, he inspired Gu Cheng in ways that demanded him to restructure the political , economic, and cultural contexts within which he worked. Whitman’s lifelong dream was to embrace the entire world, make it his home, and recruit all people as his readers, although his unremitting efforts to achieve this dream were in vain. Gu Cheng, on the other hand, seems to be a nonchalant witness to all social ups and downs of his time — a detached poet dedicated to writing nature poems. His poetry appears to reveal someone disengaged from the life of other people and the progress of society, but his poetics, like Whitman’s, are characterized by the mission of a prophet/poet, and his “misty poetry” had considerable influence in China through the last quarter of the twentieth century. Thus it is important to see how Gu Cheng reads Whitman and builds up his own theory of poetry as one of the leading poetic voices in China after the Cultural Revolution (1966 –1976). However, just as Whitman is wont to voice his thoughts in prefaces and poems, with an aversion to conventionally systematized theory, Gu Cheng is disinclined to express his theory of poetry in a traditional way. His ideas are scattered...

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