Imagining Modern Poetry

This book offers an in-depth discussion of the evolution of modernist poetry in Taiwan, with a focus on periods preceding and following World War II, and contextualizes the movement within the broader frameworks of Western, Japanese, and Chinese modernism. Through a comparative, dialectical approach, each chapter introduces individual poets and their works to explore key modernist themes such as intellectualism, fudo, pure poetry, translinguistic practice, exile, Cold War cultural ideology, and irony. Despite its significance, Taiwan’s modern poetry has received inadequate scholarly attention within Sinophone language and literature studies; this work aims to address the gap in the literature, offering fresh perspectives and innovative methodological and theoretical frameworks for those interested in Taiwan’s modernist poetic tradition.