Ai Qing

Ai Qing the Chinese poet (1910-1996), one of the most influential voices of twentieth-century Chinese poetry who gave the modern language a free, sweeping and deeply humane lyric. His verse of the land, the people and the light of hope helped to define the poetry of the war decades and inspired several generations of younger poets.

Early Life and Study in France

Ai Qing was born Jiang Zhenghan on 27 March 1910 in Jinhua, in Zhejiang province, into a landowning family that, because of a superstition, handed him to a poor peasant woman to be nursed and raised in a village. This early immersion in village life gave him a lifelong identification with the rural poor that runs through all his poetry. He showed a talent for drawing and in 1929 went to France to study painting, supporting himself with odd jobs and living in poverty in Paris.

There he read widely in art and literature, and he was particularly drawn to the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren and to the Russian poet Mayakovsky, whose free and powerful verse shaped his own. He returned to China in 1932 and joined a revolutionary art movement, for which he was briefly imprisoned. His first collection, Dayan River, appeared in 1936 and immediately established him as a poet of originality and force, with a voice that was at once personal and public.

The War Years and Great Snow

With the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in 1937, Ai Qing entered the most productive period of his life. He travelled through the country, taught and wrote, and produced a body of poetry that gave voice to the suffering and endurance of the Chinese people during eight years of conflict. His great poems, including Snow Falling on the Land of China, The North, and I Love This Land, are among the most celebrated of modern Chinese verse.

Snow Falling on the Land of China evokes the cold and the darkness, the hunger and the patience of the countryside, and it moves from desolation to a vision of a warmer dawn; I Love This Land, written in 1938, remains one of the best-known patriotic poems in the language. In 1941 he went to Yan'an, the base of the Communist forces, where he was received warmly and where he encountered the demand that art serve the revolutionary cause. He accepted much of this programme willingly, but his finest work continued to draw its power from his compassion for the ordinary people rather than from doctrine.

Poetics and Style

Ai Qing wrote a free verse that was nevertheless highly structured in its imagery and rhythm. His poems are built of large, concrete images drawn from the land, the sky and the labour of farming, and they move with a sweeping and sometimes operatic energy. He was a strong advocate of painting in words, and his early training as a painter is evident everywhere in his verse. He insisted that poetry should be written in the living language of ordinary people and should be understood by them, and he opposed obscurity and preciousness.

At the same time he demanded technical mastery and thought that freedom of form imposed a higher, not a lower, obligation on the poet. One of the most famous images in his work is that of light, the title of a poem and a recurring symbol, contrasting the small lamps and windows of the poor with the approaching brightness of a better age. His confidence in that approaching light gave his poetry its distinctive hope.

Trials and Later Years

After 1949 Ai Qing held cultural offices and travelled widely, visiting the Soviet Union and South America and writing poems of travel and of the new society. His position, however, was not secure, and in 1957 he was criticised and sent to work for many years in the remote northeast and in Xinjiang, far from literary life. His exile lasted more than two decades, and he was largely forgotten by the reading public.

These years of hardship, in which he worked as a labourer and suffered the loss of his sight, deepened rather than broke his spirit, and he continued to compose in secret. After the Cultural Revolution he was rehabilitated, and his poems returned to the anthologies. He published new collections that carried forward his old themes of hope and light, and he was honoured as a living classic of Chinese literature. He died in Beijing on 5 May 1996.

Legacy

Ai Qing is regarded as the greatest Chinese poet of the war years and one of the finest of the whole tradition of modern Chinese verse. His combination of personal lyric with national feeling, and his ability to write for the people without losing artistic seriousness, set a standard that later poets have both emulated and reacted against. His influence has been wide, and his poems are taught in schools and read aloud at commemorations.

The poet Gao Ying, his son, became a significant writer in his own right, and the family name remains associated with the best of modern Chinese poetry. He is remembered as the poet of the land and of the light, whose compassion and courage survived imprisonment, exile and blindness. His work demonstrates how a great poem can belong to a nation and still speak to the single reader, and it continues to move those who come to it for the first time.

See also

• I Love This Land
• Snow Falling on the Land of China
• July poetry
• Chinese free verse