Chairman's poem

When on Tuesday Ms.Kong asked us about Chinese poems, the first few poets that came into my mind are certainly those in Tang Dynasty, when ancient Chinese poetry were at its peak. Yet when one of the students suddenly put forward the name Mao Zedong, it suddenly reminded me of the time when I had to learn his poems in my Chinese class. That was about 5 years and I can still remember the question mark I had in my mind when my Chinese teacher introduced him as ‘’a great statesman as well as a great poet”.

I just want to talk about his second title ‘great poet’ here.

I’m not one of the good students who can get full mark or almost full mark in the peom-reading part in my Chinese exam, but I do agree a few of his famous poems are quite good, for example, the most famous one, 沁园春雪. It is said that chiang Kaishek, the then leader of Kuomintang(KMT), was quite astonished as well as jealous when he read this poem. Hoping to find a better poem than Mao’s, Jiang invited all the famous poets from the provinces under his control and offered a very high prize to the one who could write a poem in the same format as but better than Mao’s. Yet, despite of the high prize he promised, no poet managed to compose a better one.

However, I do not agree to rank him as a great poet just because the few good ones out of the 500 poems are good.

I believe that, compared with natural science，literature appreciation is something relatively subjective, and when it comes to poetry appreciation, such a feature becomes even more evident, since many poems are not complete sentences and, to understand it, readers need to use their own feelings as well as imagination. When a Chinese is reading Mao’s poem, very likely the first thing coming into his mind, when he finds out the writer is Mao, is not the poem itself, but the title ”great leader”( I don’t want to argue whether he is worthy of this title or not.) Such a title is likely to affect the reader’s judgment on this poem, and giving this poem some extra marks.

Another thing that I think that affect people’s judgments is that, there was a time when everyone in China was required to recite Mao’s poem and anyone who dared to criticize Mao’s words was considered to be the ‘traitor of the revolution’. Such a tense political atmosphere forced people to love his poems. Even though this is not true not, but such situation still has influence on people’s idea about Mao’s poems.

I would say he did write some good poems. However, he is far from a GREAT poet that can be a representative of Chinese poets.