Han Mac Tu - Poetry

Poetry

Hàn Mặc Tử's early poems - praised by Phan Bội Châu - are famous for their purity of diction and form, and show him to be a fluent Classicist with a strong interest in realistic subjects. Subsequently, his poetry showed the influence of French Symbolism, and after he fell sick, became increasingly violent and despondent. Personal despair combined with the search for poetic novelty led him to found the short-lived "Disordered" (Loạn) or "Mad" (Ðiên) school of poetry. More than a love poet, Hàn Mặc Tử was a Modernist, who sought to fuse, in a new poetic language, disparate traditions and experiences. Beginning with poems that refreshed the Classical tradition, he went on to absorb the French influence, which he directed toward the turbulence of his own painful history. His language, increasingly tortured, remained both Classical and innovative throughout; and though a Catholic, he made frequent use of Buddhist ideas and imagery.

Read more about this topic:  Han Mac Tu

Famous quotes containing the word poetry:

    The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    For me, poetry is always a search for order.
    Elizabeth Jennings (b. 1926)

    Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
    Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)