Misty Poetry

Misty Poetry, or Menglong shi, was a Chinese poetry movement that emerged in the late 1970s, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, as young poets began writing allusive, image-driven, personally introspective verse that broke sharply with the plain, ideologically direct poetry mandated under Maoist cultural policy. Centered on the unofficial literary journal Jintian, or Today, founded in Beijing in 1978 by Bei Dao and Mang Ke, the movement's leading poets, including Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting and Yang Lian, were denounced by conservative critics as obscure or misty for their dense, ambiguous imagery, a label the poets and their readers eventually embraced. Several of the movement's central figures were forced into exile after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and Misty Poetry is generally regarded as the founding movement of contemporary Chinese poetry, reopening space for personal and formally ambiguous expression after decades of state-mandated literary directness.