An Analysis Of The Tragic Elements In Li Young-Lee’s Poems

This thesis focuses on one of the most prominent and popular Chinese American poets, Li-Young Lee’s four collections of poems—Rose(1986),The City In Which I Love You(1990), Book of My Nights(2001), Behind My Eyes(2008), an interview collection Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee and one memoir—The Winged Seed: A Remembrance(1999). Diaspora experiences,diversified cultural background and Chinese and Western poetic traditions all contribute to his self-reflections on the Chinese American identity, strong desire to reconstruct self-identity and cultivation of rebellious tragic spirit. A sense of distance creates a kind of vague and grieved beauty out from his endless recollections of the departed. Under the unbearable heaviness of being, his poetry extracts tragic beauty from pains and sorrows, which is the theme of the thesis.The thesis explores the tragic elements in Lee’s poetics through three perspectives: tragic collision, tragic consciousness and tragic spirit, that are based on the western tragic theories represented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s theory of“Tragic Collision”, Martin Heidegger’s theory on “Being-towards-death” and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s idea about “Dionysian Spirit”.On the premise of the equal status of Chinese American poetry and mainstream western poetry, the thesis explores the sociological and philosophical values of Lee’s poetic theories and practices in a multi-cultural background, which is of great significance in promoting the status of Chinese American poetry.