Works
Throughout his career, Xuân Diệu had been variously known as a romantic poet, "the greatest poet among the new poets", and "the king of love poems" (he himself gave Hồ Xuân Hương the sobriquet "the Queen of Nôm poetry").
He was a member of the literary movement Tự Lực Văn Đoàn (Self-Reliance Literary Movement) and one of the leaders of the Thơ Mới (New Poetry) movement. Representative works he wrote during this period include: Thơ Thơ (Poetry poem, 1938), Gửi Hương Cho Gió (Perfume Flies with the Wind, 1945), and the short story Phấn Thông Vàng (Golden Pine Pollen, 1939).
His poetry collections Thơ thơ and Gửi hương cho gió are regarded as his masterpieces. They glorify love, life, happiness, and love of life. By that, he also glorified youth, spring, and nature as the cradle for love. He also grieved for the passing of time, the precariousness of life and showed thirst for everlasting life.
His works are often studied by secondary school students in Vietnam. A street in Hanoi is named after him.
Read more about this topic: Xuan Dieu
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary or a stool
To stumble over and vex you ... “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)