苦楚中的默示錄：柏楊詩的受難記

Abstract

The body of poetic works by Boyang is in fact not large and amounts to only over than sixty pieces including Ci. As the traditional forms of Chinese poetry goes out of fashion, Boyang’s poems written in traditional forms become unique amongst all the poems written in new forms nowadays. Boyang did not hesitate in venting the injustice in the prisons in his descriptions of what he saw and heard. From Taipei San-Zhang-Li Investigative Detention Cells to the Ministry of Defense’s Prison on Green Island, every account of his entering and exiting of each prison is filled with torture and suffering. Boyang’s lyric poetry illustrates that unreasonable institutions can become a form of violence that suppresses human potentials, and result in damage, violation, and deprivation of personal freedom. Therefore, the literary works of Boyang is his way of dealing with the suppression imposed upon him by the institution, order and law constructed upon an irrational subject. Boyang was a critical man in his time. His poetry is often referred to as poetry of resistance, not because it represents his own resistance to the violence he encountered but the resistance that the general public had to do perform at his time. In other words, Boyang’s personal depiction of his fight against violence can in effect represent that of the anonymous public. In Boyang Shi, a collection of Boyang’s poems, the various themes depicted are all tragic. After suffering the political suppression that ended in his arrest and imprisonment, Boyang documented his long years of life behind the bars and emerged as a destructed tragic hero in his poetry. His poetry is unique and significant not in that it manifests more graphic depictions of scenes or that the struggles he had gone through were particularly extraordinary, but that, instilled with his life experiences, it creates such a powerful roar that evokes touching inspirations unmatched by others. That powerful roar in his poetry was created with the strength of his whole body. This paper examines the tragic reality and the transcendence of will power represented in Boyang's poems in the Boyang Shi published in July, 2001 with the purpose to observe his illustration of suffering in his writings.