Mu Dan's Encounter with Nature: The Phantasmic, the Metaphysical, and the Lyrical

This article takes as its point of departure an analysis of “The Phantom of the Jungle” and investigates how the poet Mu Dan's 穆旦 (1918–1977) view of nature and the world was destabilized and remodeled during the Second Sino-Japanese War by his encounter with the special kind of nature embodied in the primitive forests. This investigation is followed by an exploration of Mu Dan's writing about nature from the late 1930s to the 1940s, during which there appeared a noticeable transformation in his treatment of nature, from an element of ideological construction to an object of metaphysical meditation, that paralleled his change of poetic style, from being more romantic to being more modernist. Finally, we examine the role nature played in forming Mu Dan's most representative poetic thought, new lyricism (xin de shuqing 新的抒情), in the early 1940s, which, with his experience of a different kind of nature and the influence of English modernist poetry, led him to a style of poetic expression of a different nature.