Zang Kejia and Tian Jian’s poetry

When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Chinese poets found it difficult to continue the debate on the artistic issues of poetry as the country was under the real threat of foreign occupation. The experiments and diversity of poetry writing in the 1930s (usually referring to the period 1927–1937 in Chinese literary history) soon gave way to a passionate call to arms and for engaged realism in literary creations under the strong impulse of patriotism. Revolutionary literature, if it was something debatable when it was advocated by the left-wing writers in the early 1930s, was now not only intellectually necessary but morally desirable. The individualist pursuit of personal freedom and artistic purity had been largely abandoned, while sorrow, anger, and even hatred for the Japanese imperialism became legitimate subject matter in the light of the new patriotic commitment. It was a unique period in the history of modern Chinese poetry when the extreme social condition greatly changed the mentality and sensibility of the poets who were still searching for new poetic language. What Tim Kendall said about English war poetry is applicable in the Chinese situation: “poetry … makes nothing happen; but war makes poetry happen.” ¹ Among the influential poets, Zang Kejia and Tian Jian, the two poets discussed in this chapter, are both known for their popular patriotic verses during the war. It is not a coincidence that they are also both known as peasant poets, or people’s poets, on account of their similar rural background and strong interest in depicting the miserable life of the peasants, who constituted the vast majority of the Chinese population and suffered most when their land became battlefields.