ABSTRACT
While the short story, and in particular the pioneering examples of Lu Xun discussed in Chapter 1, undoubtedly played the foremost role in modernizing Chinese literature and in institutionalizing the new Chinese vernacular (baihua) as the language of the new literature, the role played by poetry in bringing about a “literary revolution” as was advocated by progressive reformers must not be neglected, especially because the task of modernizing Chinese poetry was arguably even more daunting than that of modernizing fiction. Classical Chinese poetry written in literary Chinese (wenyan) is above all defined by its strict prosodic rules that govern meter and rhyme. Mastery of these rules was for centuries not only a sign of cultural sophistication, but also an essential requirement for success in the civil service exams. As a result, classical poetry carried immense discursive significance in the formation and articulation of moral, aesthetic, and political beliefs. It was only during the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s, a progressive reformist movement aimed at rejuvenating and modernizing Chinese culture, that classical poetry’s usefulness as a tool for self-expression or social renewal began to be questioned by intellectuals in support of the literary revolution.
