The Modernity of the Ancient-Style Verse

Abstract

This article explores the stylistic innovations in the Ancient-Style Verse (gutishi 古體詩), and particularly in the subgenre of gexing 歌行, from the Late Qing to the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that the relative free prosody of the Ancient-Style allowed innovation disguised as restoration. Yet, instead of being the prelude to modern vernacular poetry, the innovations in this genre may have found an end in themselves—namely, creating a style of verse which showed a unique combination of modern elements and deliberate stylistic archaism. Its lyric archaism and innovation were formulated in dialectical terms, which have been frequently evoked in the reformative moments of the Chinese tradition. This paper examines the evolution of the new gexing style through the close reading of a few gexing poems by Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848−1905), Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873−1929), Lin Gengbai 林庚白 (1896−1941), and Liu Yazi 柳亞子 (1887−1958). Given the rise of vernacular poetry since 1917, the poems of Lin and Liu may be called the Classicist Verse, which represents the author’s conscious choice to elaborate on the subject matter using a particular classical genre, when other modern genres are available. In the end, I will also discuss the gexing style verses by Li Sichun 李思純 in the translation of multi-stanza European poetry, as a practice in accord to the indigenization agenda of the Critical Review magazine.