Elegy in Paradise Lost：On Li Jinfa's Symbolistic Poems

Li Jingfa, a pioneer of the Chinese symbolic poetry, was unfairly called “a poetic eccentric for his use of the symbolic poetical devices and unduly criticized as an undiscriminating advocate of foreign literature. There are thr ee reasons for this misunderstanding: i. his themes were mainly those on deaths, dreams, fantasy and tragic love; ii. most of his poems, though many of them on patriotism, love, arts and Nature, were negative; iii. his were evidently Westernized in their use of metaphors, ambiguities and images. There is obviously an underlining development from the “modern poems in the 1930's through the so called “nine leaves poets in the 40's to the “ambiguity poems in the 70's or 80's in the modern Chinese poetic history.