Between License and Responsibility: Reexamining the Role of the Poet in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Society

While the era of Opening Up and Reform released poets from the ideological restraints of earlier periods to pursue “art for art's sake,” the growing gap between the rich and poor and the mass human migrations to crowded urban centers from still-impoverished rural provinces have forced poets to again reflect on the relationship between poetry and society. According to sinologist Heather Inwood, this dichotomy can be traced to the inception of modern Chinese poetry—poets struggled with the simultaneous need to invent new forms of vernacular poetry while placing poetry in the service of the nation and revolutionary politics. If poetry written in the late-1970s through the '90s is known for its cosmopolitan, formally experimental poetics, many poets writing in the new millennium reveal a new leftism that stresses populist, straightforward vernacular poetry that seeks to serve China's working classes, migrant laborers, and the disenfranchised.