Xu Zhimo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Names | |
|---|---|
| Family name (姓氏): | 徐 Xú |
| Given name (名): | 章垿 Zhāngxù |
| Courtesy names (字): | 槱森 Yoǔsēn, later 志摩 Zhìmó |
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Xu.
Xu Zhimo (Chinese: 徐志摩; pinyin: Xú Zhìmó; Wade-Giles: Hsü Chih-mo; January 15, 1897 – November 19, 1931) was a 20th-century Chinese poet. He was given the name of Zhangxu (Chinese: 章垿; pinyin: Zhāngxù) and the courtesy name of Yousen (Chinese: 槱森; pinyin: Yoǔsēn). He later changed his courtesy name to Zhimo.
He is romanticized as pursuing love, freedom, and beauty all his life (from the words of Hu Shih). He promoted the form of modern Chinese poetry, and therefore made tremendous contributions to modern Chinese literature.
[edit] Brief Biography
Xu Zhimo was born in Xiashi, in Zhejiang province, and died in Jinan in Shandong province. In 1918, after studying at Peking University (now a.k.a. Beijing University), he traveled to the United States to study economics and political science at Columbia University in New York City. Finding the States "intolerable", he left in 1920 to study at Cambridge University in England, where he fell in love with English romantic poetry like that of Keats and Shelley, and was also influenced by the French romantic and symbolist poets, some of whose works he translated into Chinese. In 1922 he went back to China and became a leader of the modern poetry movement. When the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore visited China, Xu Zhimo played the part of oral interpreter. Xu's literary ideology was mostly pro-western, and pro-vernacular. He was one of the first Chinese writers to successfully naturalize Western romantic forms into modern Chinese poetry. He worked as an editor and professor at several schools before dying in a plane crash on November 19, 1931 in Jinan while flying from Nanjing to Beijing. He left behind four collections of verse and several volumes of translations from various languages.
[edit] References
- Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, article – "Hsü Chih-mo"
- This page is partly translated from the Chinese wikipedia article at http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/徐志摩
