Xu Zhimo: Crescent Moon Poetry

The "Crescent Moon Society" was founded by Xu Zhimo and others in Beijing in 1923. In the early period, the main members included writers such as Hu Shi, Chen Yuan, Ling Shuhua and Lin Huiyin, professors and celebrities in various circles. In April 1926, Wen Yiduo and Xu Zhimo established the Poetry supplement of Beijing's Morning Post, began to clearly put forward theoretical views on modern new metrical poems, gathered a number of poets, and made active attempts to create new metrical poems. The new metrical poetry school was the early "Crescent Moon School of Poetry" marked by the establishment of the Poetry supplement. After 1928, Xu Zhimo founded the "Crescent Moon" bookstore in Shanghai with Hu Shi, etc., founded the Crescent Moon magazine with Liang Shiqiu, etc., gathered a number of young poets under the flag of the "Crescent Moon" and continued to actively explore new poetry. This was the later period of the "Crescent Moon School of Poetry." In both the early period and a representative figure in it and could be called the soul of the "Crescent Moon School of Poetry."

The "Crescent Moon School of Poetry'1 systematically elaborated the theory of new poetry's metrics, and emphasized that the most important aesthetic features of new poetry should be "harmony" and "regularity," most prominently manifested in Wen Yiduo's proposal on poetry's "three beauties" (i.e. "architectural beauty, musical beauty and pictorial beauty"). The new metrical poetry school's "newness" lay in elimination of various rules of classical Chinese, old rhymes and old-style metrical poetry, emphasis on syllables and rhythms in poems, inheritance of the essence of classical poetry and innovation, represented by Xu Zhimo's poems. The "Crescent Moon School of Poetry" also advocated nature, gave attention to "personalities," translated a lot of foreign poems, transplanted a lot of foreign poetry styles and forms, and injected new emotional vitality and expression ability into the development of Chinese modern new poetry.

Xu Zhimo (1897-1931), a native of Haining, Zhejiang, studied in the University of Shanghai, Peiyang University in Tianjin and Peking University. He went to the United States for overseas studies in 1918 and transferred to the University of Cambridge in Britain to work on political economy in 1920, but he was more interested in modern British aesthetic poetry and began to create poems at the same time. He returned to China in 1922, and continued to engage in poetry creation while teaching at a university. In November 1931, he died in a plane crash. Xu Zhimo's main works include Zhimo s Poems (1925), A Night in Florence (1927), Tiger (1931) and Roaming (1932). Besides, he also created nearly 100 uncollected poems and translated poems.

As the representative poet of the Crescent Moon School, Xu Zhimo tried to make achievements in metrics. He thought that new poetry should create perfect metrics. In the practice of poetry creation, he created diversified genres and styles of poetry. In his first poetry collection Zhimo s Poems, the relationship between lines and stanzas is handled in different ways. There are three-line stanzas, eight-line stanzas and ten-line stanzas, and some poems have no stanzas. He used various formats to create new poetry, and brought about a new trend of new poetry. He mostly adopted Western poetry's rhymes. For example, he used the AABB rhyme pattern for Sir! Sir!, the AABB rhyme pattern for To Look for a Star and the ABAB rhyme pattern for He's Afraid to Open his Mouth, revealing change in harmonious rhymes in poetry.

Xu Zhimo paid attention to poems' overall beauty. He deemed a poem as an organic whole, giving emphasis to association and proportion between the parts and the whole. This is Xu Zhimo's specific view on poetry aesthetics under the guidance of the overall aesthetic principle of perfect forms. To attain the state of poems' overall beauty, he often used symmetrical and overlapping sentences. Take Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again, for example. There were many famous scenic spots near Cambridge, but the poet focused on depicting the River Cam and used the method of repetition at the beginning or end of each stanza. The ABCB rhyme pattern is adopted for each four-line stanza, and the melody is harmonious and full of musical beauty. In the first short four-line stanza, the word "quietly" appears three times, creating a lively rhythm in sentiment and making the whole poem immersed in the beauty of repetitive rhythms and rhymes.

The greatest influence of Xu Zhimo's creation on new poetry was the musicality of his poems. He was the best practitioner of "musical beauty" advocated by the Crescent Moon School. He thought that just like blood circulation was the secret of every person's body, a poem's secret was the regularity and flow of the syllables in it. Therefore, Xu Zhimo meticulously organized every poem's rhymes and metrics. He wrote in A Snowflake's Happiness, "If I were a snowflake, drifting suavely in mid-air, I would recognize my direction - soaring, soaring, soaring - The ground below holds my direction." There are three pauses in each line of the poem, and each pause consists of two to four Chinese characters, forming a slow rhythm. The "-ake" and "-air" rhymes are open and soft, corresponding to the charm of drifting snowflakes. The tune and rhyme are changed from the third sentence, and the more sonorant and rising "-ion" and "-ing" rhymes are used. The whole poem with harmonious rhymes is graceful and smooth, having a kind of natural beauty. In poems such as Roaming, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again and / Bought a Handful of Lotus Seed Pods beside the Yangtze River, musicality emerges from interaction between rhymes and feelings, realizing integration of "spiritual music" and "rhetorical music."

Besides, Xu Zhimo's poems are spiritually transcendental, natural, beautiful and highly individualized. For example, though the famous poem Sayonara consists of only five lines, it vividly depicts the bearing, feelings and psychological activities of the "Japanese girl" at the time of saying goodbye to her friend. It is graceful, soft and peaceful, with expectation in sorrow. The whole poem is permeated with a complex emotion and can be called the best poem of the New Crescent School.

Hu Shi made such a summary for Xu Zhimo, "His view on life is really a pure belief in three words: love, freedom and beauty." Zhu Ziqing praised Xu Zhimo's poems, saying "they are a river of life gurgling day and night." If let people see new poems could be written this way, then Xu Zhimo let people see new poems written this way were great!