楊牧의 시 세계—새로운 예술성의 실험과 완성

Abstract

Today, poems of Yang Mu 楊牧(1940-2020) are receiving new light and praise from numerous poets and scholars. The reason may be that his poetry has innovative ideas and high perfection of art that will make a huge difference in the existing modern Chinese poetry. In an era of the unprecedented crisis in humanities, his poetry opens up the possibility of new modern poetry as a “game changer.” For the challenge of such a possibility, “Manuscript in a Bottle 瓶中稿(1974)” replaces longing for home with phrases and lines reminiscent of the rhythm and sound of waves, proving that content and form are organically interactive. In “Hawk of the Mind 心之鷹(1992),” it suggests what poetry is as a symbol of hawk, which inferred the birth and extinction of a poem through the sympathy between the hawks and the poetic speaker. In particular, when the poetic speaker and the hawk meet to form unity and suggest the birth of the poem, the form of the poem is completely unified with the content. The “dramatic monologue” featuring poetic speakers has become a major feature of Yang Mu’s poetry. In “Symbol象徵(1996),” “dramatic monologue” is influenced by Chinese classics that value lyricism along with Western modernity, and the poem is completed through the reader’s reasoning and imagination because universal truth and symbols are implied. Thus, in this poem, ‘symbol’ is not to find specific and objective intermediates facing the reality of life, but to discover the fundamental relationships hidden behind them. Various poetic speakers are also appearing in Yang Mu’s poetry, both historical and fictional characters found around the world. There are quite a few attempts to title animals or insects, but most of them are talked about by poetic speakers, and they rarely become poetic speakers themselves. However, “Rabbits兔(1997)” raises profound issues such as the love that humans agonize over, the decline of life, the truth, and artistic pursuit through the conversation between the male rabbit and the female rabbit. As we have seen above, it is not easy to define Yang Mu’s poetry in one word. Perhaps his poetry was stored on the beach like ‘Manuscript in a Bottle’ and later discovered by someone else, so he wants to continue his story.