| The rhythmic rigidity in her poetries makes Zheng Min a rare figure among modern Chinese poets. It seems to the author that the poetess' theory underlies and goes along with her works. The paper here, starting from Zheng Min's sonnets, is an attempt to hand out, if possible, a more holistic review of her poetic works, which stylistically remind us to the sonnets of Rilke and Feng Zhi.The beauty and elegance of Zheng Min's early year works, however, appears with looseness in rhythms. Such rhythmic 'flaws' in respect of sonnet lasted for decades until 1990s, when some of her most well-known works such as Poet and Death and Bestow of Life were written. During this time, she concerned more with quality than quantity and the works are therefore more experimental in nature. In these works, the rhythmic tonal rigidity is meticulously preserved vis-a-vis sorts of panoramic verbal sublimity, which, though of course owns a lot from Rilke and Feng Zhi, is probably no less from the poetess's own sensibility than from heritage. Such galvanizing works is indeed a fecund repertory, and is especially precious during the time, when sonnets had long been forgotten, the poets long been marginalized and the poetic writing long been nothing but chaos.Zheng Min devoted her life to writing sonnets. Starting from 1930-40s, she ceased three decades, and finally recaptured it in 1980-90s. The paper is therefore a valuable case study for the poetess, who, in her intermittently long years of writing, goes through the flow and ebb of Chinese sonnets, witnessing the adolescence and maturity of Chinese new poetry.As to her, thought, poetry and life become one and the same, that is to say, the poetess achieves in her not only the unity of life and poetry, but also that of poetry and thought. |
