Xu Zhimo

Xu Zhimo the Chinese poet and essayist (1897-1931) who introduced the forms and sensibility of English Romanticism to modern Chinese verse and became the most romantic figure of the May Fourth generation. His lyric poetry of love, freedom and nature, and his turbulent life, made him a legend in his own short lifetime.

Early Life and Studies Abroad

Xu Zhimo was born on 15 January 1897 in Haining, in Zhejiang province, into a wealthy merchant and banking family. He was a brilliant student and went to the United States in 1918 to study economics at Clark University and then at Columbia, but his interests soon turned to literature and philosophy. He moved to England in 1921 to study at Cambridge, and his years there transformed him. Contact with English poets and thinkers, and the atmosphere of Cambridge itself, gave him the model of the free and individual poet, and he began to write verse in the vernacular with a new lyrical freedom.

At Cambridge he encountered the work of the Romantic poets, and he came under the influence of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose translator and companion he later became during Tagore's visit to China. The meeting with Tagore strengthened his belief that a poet should live freely and answer to beauty. He also began writing the poems that would establish his reputation and formed the friendships that shaped modern Chinese poetry.

Poetry and the Crescent Moon Society

Returning to China in 1922, Xu Zhimo threw himself into literary life. In 1923 he helped to found the Crescent Moon Society, a group that took its name from Tagore's collection and that sought to bring order, rhythm and beauty to the new vernacular poetry that had arisen after the May Fourth movement. The society published journals and anthologies and became the centre of a movement later called the Crescent Moon school.

Its members believed that the freedom of the new poetry should not mean the abandonment of form, and they experimented with metre, stanza and image while insisting on the poet's personal and individual voice. His own collections, including Poems of Zhimo and the celebrated volume A Night in Florence, showed a gift for melody and for the sensuous image. He wrote of love, of separation, of the fleeting beauty of nature, and of the desire for freedom, and his verse was set to music and learned by heart by generations of Chinese students.

Cambridge, Love and the Romantic Life

The most famous of his poems, Farewell to Cambridge, written after a visit to England and published in 1928, expresses in gentle, recurrent rhythms a tender and resigned leave-taking of a beloved place. It is one of the best-known poems in modern Chinese literature and is still recited by schoolchildren. His personal life was as romantic as his verse and caused great scandal. He left his first wife, Zhang Youyi, an arranged marriage, to pursue the young Lin Huiyin, and later married the married陆小曼 whose divorce and remarriage shocked conservative society.

His emotional entanglements became part of his legend and coloured the reception of his poetry. Friends remembered him as charming and open-handed, and he was as ready to help a struggling young writer as to court a new love. He was by temperament impulsive, generous and restless, and he cultivated in his art and in his life the ideal of the free individual answerable to feeling and beauty rather than to convention. This very quality made him both admired and criticised in his own time, and it has kept his memory vivid.

Prose, Teaching and Travel

Beyond poetry Xu Zhimo wrote a large body of essays, letters and travel sketches distinguished by their ease and charm. His prose is intimate and musical, and his accounts of journeys in Europe and China convey a lively curiosity and a gift for the telling detail. He taught at several universities, including Peking University and Tsinghua, and edited literary pages and journals through which he promoted the ideals of the Crescent Moon group.

He encouraged younger poets and translators and worked to widen the contact between Chinese and Western literature. His essays and letters, collected after his death, remain a vivid record of the literary life of his time. In 1925 he travelled through the Soviet Union and wrote a series of impressions that were read as a sober and somewhat sceptical account of the new order. He continued to write and to teach until the end of his life, dividing his time between Beijing and Shanghai.

Death and Legacy

Xu Zhimo died on 19 November 1931 in an aeroplane crash near Jinan, while flying to hear a lecture by Lin Huiyin. He was only thirty-four, and his death, sudden and dramatic, sealed his romantic reputation and moved the whole literary world of China to mourning. His poetry is remembered for its melody, its emotional directness and its devotion to love and freedom, and Farewell to Cambridge remains one of the most quoted poems in the language.

His advocacy of form and beauty gave the new poetry a standard of craft that raised its artistic standing. His death was felt as a personal loss by writers across the political spectrum, and elegies for him were written by friends and rivals alike. He stands as the archetypal romantic poet of modern China, a figure whose short life and lyrical verse embody the era's longing for individual freedom. Through his work and his legend he shaped the way later Chinese poets and readers imagined the very idea of the poet.

See also

• Farewell to Cambridge
• Crescent Moon Society
• May Fourth Movement
• New Culture Movement