Chinese Poetry and the Chinese Language:Their Estrangement from and Identification with Each Other

The study of Chinese vernacular verse in the context of the Chinese language is a new topic. On the one hand, the Chinese expressions in the vernacular verse are full of Europeanized sentence structures under the impact of the poetic language of the West; on the other hand, the vernacular verse has been estranged from the Chinese context as a result of its defiance of traditional Chinese culture. To push Chinese poetry out of its doldrums and to revive it, the poets should confine their works to the Chinese context and identify poetry with the Chinese language.