Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.12, 2014

New Gexing and Modern Poetry in China

(Abstract)

Fu Xiangxi

As an important prosodic form that arose during the poetic revolution of the late Qing, new gexing (新歌行) or song-style poetry exerted a profound influence over modern Chinese poetry. For a long time, however, it has attracted little academic attention and even less substantive research. New gexing inherited some features of traditional gexing and Song poetry, but it broke through the constraints of the old poetic forms, serving as a model and a catalyst for the emergence of new poetry in terms of “bringing colloquial language into poetry” and “using prose language in poetry,” thus becoming both a representative of late Qing poetry and a precursor of modern poetry. New gexing thus fills the gap between the new poetry school and vernacular (baihua) poetry and constitutes an important link in the transformation of Chinese poetry in the late Qing and early Republican period.