Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West.
Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West.