Misty poets

The Misty Poets (Chinese: ; pinyin: Ménglóng Shīrén) are a group of 20th century Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution. They are so named because their work has been officially denounced as "obscure", "misty", or "hazy" poetry (menglong shi). But according to Gu Cheng, "the defining characteristic of this new type of poetry is its realism--it begins with objective realism but veers towards a subjective realism; it moves from a passive reaction toward active creation." The movement was initially centered on the magazine Jintian (Chinese: ; pinyin: Jīntiān; literally: "Today"), which was founded by Bei Dao and Mang Ke and published from 1978 until 1980, when it was banned.

Guo Lusheng is among the earliest poets of the sent-down youth generation poets and was an inspiration for several of the original Misty Poets. Five important misty poets, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, He Dong and Yang Lian, were exiled after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Jintian was resurrected in Sweden in 1990 as a forum for expatriate Chinese writers.

The work of the Misty Poets has had a strong influence on the lyrics of China's first generation of rock musicians, particularly Cui Jian.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong decreed certain cultural requirements for literature and art in China. According to these ideas, writers and artists were encouraged to form a "cultural army" to educate the masses and provide them with revolutionary values. All art would therefore be political and there was no art for art's sake. According to these requirements, the poetry was relatively compliant and realistic, as the following example shows:

...
Wikipedia