Xu Zhimo

Xu Zhimo (徐志摩, Wu Chinese pronunciation: [ʑi tsɿ mu], Mandarin: [ɕy̌ ʈʂî mwǒ], 15 January 1897 – 19 November 1931) was a Chinese poet. Best known for his work in modern Chinese poetry, he strove to loosen Chinese poetry from its traditional forms, incorporating influences from Western poetry and writing in vernacular Chinese. He died in a plane crash at age 34.

Biography

Xu Zhimo has several names. He is most known as Xú Zhìmó (徐志摩; Wu IPA: ʑi tsɿ mu, Wu pinyin: Zhi Tsymu; Mandarin IPA: [ɕǔ ʈʂî mwǒ], Wades-Giles: Hsü Chih-mo), while he was born Xú Zhāngxù (徐章垿) with the courtesy name Yǒusēn (槱森).

Xu was born in Haining, Zhejiang and graduated from Hangzhou High School, a well-known school in Southern China. He married Zhang Youyi in 1915 and attended Peiyang University in 1916 (now Tianjin University) to study law. In 1917, he moved to Peking University (PKU) due to the law department of Peiyang University merging into PKU. In 1918, he traveled to the United States to earn his bachelor's degree at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he took up a major in political and social sciences, along with a minor in history.

Shortly afterward, he enrolled at Columbia University in New York to pursue a graduate degree in economics and politics in 1919. He left New York in 1920, having found the U.S. "intolerable", to go study in England at London School of Economics. In 1921, he transferred to King's College, Cambridge, as a special student, where he fell in love with English Romantic poetry like that of Keats and Shelley.

He was also influenced by the French romantic and symbolist poets, some of whose works he translated into Chinese. In 1922 he returned to China and became a leading figure of the modern poetry movement. In 1923, he founded the Crescent Moon Society, a Chinese literary society that was part of the larger New Culture Movement, believing in "art for art's sake" and often engaging in running debates with the "art for politics' sake" (Chinese Communist Party-driven) League of the Left-Wing Writers.

When the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore visited China, Xu Zhimo served as one of his oral interpreters. Xu used vernacular Chinese and translated Western romantic forms into modern Chinese poetry. He worked as an editor and professor at several schools before his death on 19 November 1931, dying in a plane crash near Jinan and Tai'an, Shandong[2] while flying on a Stinson Detroiter from Nanjing to Beijing. He left behind four collections of verse and several volumes of translations from various languages.