| Writing about disasters is a phenomenon that deserves attention in poetry writing.The year 2020 saw the unprecedented outbreak and spread of Newcastle pneumonia,which plunged the world into a long and unpredictable disaster.The poetry of the epidemic,in the early days of the dire situation,exploded in a "spurt",forming a powerful wave of epidemic poetry.This article takes the 2020 epidemic poetry wave in China as an object of observation,and explores to some extent the problems of writing about disasters in poetry.The text consists of a foreword,a body,a conclusion and an appendix,with three chapters in the body.The preface focuses on ’poetry and disaster’,discussing the concept and scope of’disaster’ and the reasons for writing about it in poetry.The first chapter provides a general introduction to the Chinese epidemic poetry wave of 2020.The chapter distinguishes between the concepts of ’epidemic poetry’ and’anti-epidemic poetry’,introduces the scale of the epidemic poetry wave in terms of both publication and creators,and extracts four types of ideological themes from the diverse content of epidemic poetry,namely the spirit of struggle in which man prevails over nature Finally,it provides an objective review of the strengths and weaknesses of the epidemic poetry wave,taking into account the comments of other scholars on the epidemic poetry wave.The second chapter selects some representative poems and compares the different ways of telling the disaster between the official and private sectors from three perspectives: "speech strategy","content" and "speaker".It also analyses the reasons behind these differences.The third chapter focuses on the questions of "what poets do" and "what poetry does",and discusses the ethical direction that poetry should follow when writing about disasters.Firstly,it answers the question of whether poets should write poetry in the face of disasters,and discusses the qualities that poets should possess as ’human beings’,’social citizens’ and ’poetic citizens’."The second section considers how poetry can speak about disasters in order to gain maximum effectiveness and vitality,and suggests that poetry writing should balance the ethics of human beings and the ethics of literature.The concluding remarks discuss the dilemmas facing poetry in the new media age.During the epidemic,the vivid images provided by the new media effectively relieved the public’s anxiety,and video became the main way to pass time,while the influence and traditional functions of poetry were severely weakened.In this regard,seeking transcendence is the key for poetry to overcome the crisis.Appendix 1 provides a brief review of the brief recovery of epidemic poetry writing in 2022;in Appendix 2,the author has selected several representative poetry(literary)journals,websites and We Chat public websites,and collated the epidemic poems they published in 2020. |
