Wen Yiduo

Wen Yiduo a Chinese poet, scholar and public intellectual of the twentieth century (1899-1946) whose verse helped to found the formal, imagistic style of modern Chinese poetry and whose later classical scholarship was admired for its rigour. He ended his life as a democratic campaigner, and his assassination in 1946 made him a symbol of resistance to political terror.

Youth and American Education

Wen Yiduo was born on 24 November 1899 in Xishui, Hubei province, into a scholarly family. He received a thorough classical training as a boy and showed an early gift for painting and verse. He passed into the preparatory school of Tsinghua College in Beijing, where the mixture of Chinese tradition and American missionary teaching that later shaped his poetry first took hold.

At Tsinghua he was a student leader and an editor of the school magazine, and his literary tastes turned toward the new poetry of the time. After graduating in 1922 he sailed for the United States, studying art and literature at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colorado College of Art and elsewhere. In America he deepened his knowledge of Western poetry and painting and began to write seriously.

The experience of living abroad sharpened his sense of being Chinese and coloured many of his poems with a longing for home. He returned to China in 1925 and threw himself into teaching and literary work. He married Gao Xiaoqing, having earlier agreed to the match, and the relationship became an important and complicated presence in his life.

Poetry and the Crescent Society

Wen Yiduo was a leading member of the Crescent Society, a group of writers who gathered around the journal Crescent Monthly and who sought a more refined and disciplined poetry than the earliest free verse had offered. He argued that new poetry must combine the vivid impression of the image with the musical discipline of rhythm and metre, an idea he developed in essays and in his own practice.

His two slim collections, Red Candle and Dead Water, are among the landmarks of modern Chinese verse. They are marked by dense imagery, strong colour and a sculpted music, and by an anguished concern with the decay of the old culture and the uncertainty of the new. The poem known as Dead Water, with its stark picture of stagnation, is often taken as an emblem of the mood of the 1920s.

He insisted on the slogan of beauty as the aim of art, and he wrote with care, revising obsessively and condemning the facile verse of his contemporaries. His theories of the three beauties, of music, painting and architecture in the poem, were widely debated. Although his poetic output was small, its influence on the craft of later poets was considerable.

Turn to Scholarship

In the late 1920s Wen Yiduo gradually withdrew from the centre of literary life and devoted himself to the study of classical texts. He taught at several universities, including Wuhan and Qingdao, and in 1932 joined the faculty of Tsinghua University in Beijing. There he worked with great intensity on the oldest monuments of Chinese poetry, most notably the songs of the Classic of Poetry and the elegies of Chu.

He applied to these ancient texts a method that combined textual criticism, philology and the evidence of folklore, anthropology and popular custom. He argued that many difficult lines could be understood by comparing them with the living songs and rituals of his own day, and he tracked the mythological and religious ideas that lay beneath the courtly surface of the classic. This method, sometimes called literary archaeology, was influential and is still discussed.

His work on the Book of Changes, on the songs of Chu and on the mythology of the ancient world was left unfinished at his death but was collected and published later. Colleagues remembered him as a shy, exacting and immensely learned man who moved from poetry to scholarship with the same passion for form and truth. He had traded the fame of a poet for the quieter reputation of a specialist.

Teacher and Public Figure

With the movement of the universities to the southwest during the war against Japan, Wen Yiduo taught at the merged institution that became known as Southwest Associated University in Kunming. The years of exile and poverty changed him. He grew critical of the government, joined the democratic movement, and became a prominent voice calling for peace, reform and the opening of political life.

He read actively in radical and progressive literature and spoke at meetings of the democratic parties. As a member of a democratic league he helped to organise the demand for a coalition government and an end to the civil conflict between the nationalists and the communists. His beard, grown as a pledge not to shave until the war was won, became a familiar emblem of his commitment.

His courage and his eloquence made him a symbolic figure, and his criticism of the government drew threats. On 15 July 1946, at a memorial meeting for a murdered democrat in Kunming, he delivered a defiant speech, and a few hours later he was shot dead in the street. A second assassination followed soon afterwards, and the two murders shocked the country.

Death, Influence and Legacy

Wen Yiduo's death made him a martyr of the democratic cause. The killings provoked outrage across China and abroad and isolated the government that stood accused. In the changed political order that followed, his poetry and his integrity were honoured, and he was reclaimed as one of the great modern figures of the nation.

As a poet he helped to give modern Chinese verse a formal discipline and a rich store of image and music, and his few poems remain among the most quoted of the period. As a scholar he showed that the oldest texts could be read afresh with the tools of modern learning, and his studies of the classic songs and of ancient myth opened paths that later researchers followed.

His life is often read as a parable of the intellectual in a time of crisis: the aesthete who turned to patient scholarship and then, under the pressure of events, to political speech. Schools and memorials bear his name, and his collected works are read both for their poetry and for their scholarship. He is remembered for a verse of hard, bright images and for a death that made his words part of history.

See also

• Crescent Society
• Modern Chinese poetry
• Classic of Poetry
• Southwest Associated University