“徒劳”的挣扎：新诗初创期胡适诗歌考察 — 以最初发表的白话诗为中心

Abstract

Hushi’s first published poems aimed at revolutionizing the traditional styles of poetic writings. It is said that when he was a graduate student at USA he had a big argument with his friends about how to modernize the Chinese language. Hushi insisted that Classical Chinese should be replaced by Vernacular Chinese but his friends disagreed. The main ground for this disagreement was that Vernacular Chinese is a language not well-suited for writing a poem. This left Hushi no choice but to create a poem using Vernacular Chinese with a view to proving his friends wrong and giving impetus to the revolutionary transition from Classical Chinese to Vernacular Chinese. He first attempted to write eight poems, which were later published by the magazine New Youth. It is to be admitted that Hushi’s poems were not poetic masterpieces especially by an aesthetic standard. For this reason or others, they have long fallen off the radar among Chinese literature scholars. But I do believe that there is something important to learn from Hushi’s early poetic works when viewed from a larger context that includes not only their aesthetic values but also their contributions to stylistic developments in modern Chinese poetry. So this paper aims at digging deep into Hushi’s early poetic works and evaluating them in light of his idiosyncratic project of creating new ways of writing poems. The upshot is that a careful examination of Hushi’s poems reveals that there is something important that has been neglected by the past research. I hold that Hushi’s poems made great contributions to opening a new chapter in the modern history of Chinese poetry but, unfortunately, those contributions are not fully appreciated so far by contemporary scholars.