Wen Yiduo

Wen Yiduo (; 24 November 189915 July 1946) was a Chinese poet and scholar known for his nationalistic poetry. Wen was assassinated by the Kuomintang in 1946.

Life Wen Yiduo was born Wén Jiāhuá on 24 November 1899 in what is now Xishui County in Hubei Province. After receiving a traditional Chinese Confucian education he went on to continue studying at Tsinghua University.

In 1922, he traveled to the United States to study fine arts and literature at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was during this time that his first collection of poetry, Hongzhu (, "Red Candle"), was published. In 1925, he traveled back to China and took a university teaching post. In 1928, his second collection, Sishui (, "Dead Water"), was published. In the same year he joined the Crescent Moon Society and wrote essays on poetry. He also began to publish the results of his classical Chinese literature research. Wen experienced discrimination in the United States. In his writing about these experience, Wen stated, "I have a nation, I have a history and a culture of five thousand years: How can this be inferior to the Americans?"

There is a monument to Wen at the Yunnan Normal University campus in Kunming, as well as a large statue. A small memorial to him, including a wall portrait painted from a famous picture of him smoking his pipe is found in a walkway by his former home (the site is now part of an elementary school) in the Green Lake area of Kunming. He and his wife, Gao Zhen, are buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.

Poetry Wen's poetry is noted for its experimentation with classical Chinese rules and forms. He modeled his poetry on that of the English poets John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning, and tried to "recapture the symbolism and ethos of premodern Chinese society". The poems in his second collection, Dead Water (Sǐshuǐ ), have "a haunting musicality", and deal with the "heartrendingly heavy" subject of exposing social injustice and corruption.

Scholarship Wen was credited by David Hawkes as the initiator of the cult of Qu Yuan as "China's first patriotic poet", writing that, "although Qu Yuan did not write about the life of the people or voice their sufferings, he may truthfully be said to have acted as the leader of a people's revolution and to have struck a blow to avenge them. Qu Yuan is the only person in the whole of Chinese history who is fully entitled to be called 'the people's poet'." Wen himself would write, "I am a worshipper of Ch'ü Yüan," in 1944, around the same time when he began to "crystallize, as no one had before, the themes of Ch'ü Yüan." He studied modern Chinese history, including his grandfather's travels to Chicago, and collected and donated a number of materials about Wen Yiduo to National Southwestern Associated University (presently Yunnan Normal University).