The Misty Poets (Chinese: 朦胧诗人; pinyin: Ménglóng Shīrén) are a group of 20th century Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution. They are so named because their work has been officially denounced as "obscure", "misty", or "hazy" poetry (menglong shi). The movement was initially centered on the magazine Jintian (Chinese: 今天; pinyin: Jīntiān; literally "Today"), which was published from 1978 until 1980, when it was banned.
Guo Lusheng is among the earliest poets of the zhiqing generation poets and was an inspiration for several of the original Misty Poets. Four important misty poets, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo and Yang Lian, were exiled after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Jintian was resurrected in Sweden in 1990 as a forum for expatriate Chinese writers.
The work of the Misty Poets has had a strong influence on the lyrics of China's first generation of rock musicians, particularly Cui Jian.
Read more about Misty Poets: List of Misty Poets
Famous quotes containing the words misty and/or poets:
“In his comprehensive delight in all experience Dickens resembles Walt Whitman, but he was innocent of that nebulous transcendentalism that blurred Whitman’s universe into vast misty panoramas and left him, for all his huge democratic vistas, unable to tell a story or paint a single concrete human being.”
—Edgar Johnson (1912–1990)
“Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)