Xu Zhimo

Xu Zhimo was an early 20th century poet. He was given the name of Zhangxu and the courtesy name of Yousen . He later changed his courtesy name to Zhimo .

He is romanticized as pursuing love, freedom, and beauty all his life . He promoted the form of , and therefore made tremendous contributions to modern Chinese literature.

To commemorate Xu Zhimo, in July, 2008, a white marble stone has been installed at the back of King's College, University of Cambridge, on which is inscribed a verse from Xu's best-known poem, 'Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again'.

Brief Biography

Xu was born in . In 1918, after studying at Peking University, he traveled to the United States to study history in Clark University. Shortly afterwards, he transferred to Columbia University in New York to study economics and politics in 1919. Finding the States "intolerable", he left in 1920 to study at King's College, Cambridge in England, where he fell in love with English poetry like that of Keats and , and was also influenced by the French romantic and 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 Rabindranath Tagore visited China, Xu Zhimo played the part of oral interpreter. Xu's literary ideology was mostly pro-western, and pro-. 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 while flying from Nanjing to Beijing. He left behind four collections of verse and several volumes of translations from various languages.