The Poetics of Fei Ming: How the Classical Merged with the Modernist

Abstract

Fei Ming (1901-1969) is an iconic fictionist who had mastered the fusion of Chinese classical literary images with Western modernist writing techniques, a glaring label overshadowing his accomplishments in poetry. This paper looks at Fei Ming’s footprint in poetry within the context of the reforming and modernizing process of Chinese poetry in the first half of the 20th century. It offers a particular angle of viewing Fei Ming’s undervalued poetic aesthetics, in which he seamlessly reconciled the confrontational forces vacillating the development of Chinese poetry, namely, traditional form versus modern form and Chinese style versus Western style. Specifically, he blended modern philosophy with traditional lyricism to create natural flows of beauty and imbedded the Western symbolist and imagist techniques in forming a unique Chinese poetry style without compromising the sense of coherence. His proposal that new poetry should embrace a poetic “mind” with a prose-like “body” has shaped the making of Chinese modern poetry in its time of need. His equal treatment of the poetic elements of Chinese tradition and Western modern manifests a new interpretation of modernist poetry, a different mentality to approach modernism, and further a distinct paradigm of global modernisms, alternative to the Anglo-American ones.