Feng Chih (1906-), poet, essayist, and professor of German literature. He was one of the most respected poets of the late republican period. Famous for his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and for his own lyrics in sonnet form, Feng repudiated both after 1949 to become a practitioner of patriotic verse and an ardent and official spokesman for Chinese Communist literary theory and practice.

Little is known of Feng Chih's childhood and youth. He was born in Chohsien, Hopei, a rural community some 45 miles southwest of Peking. His family appears to have been related to a local Feng clan which had been prominent in the district since early Ch'ing times. Feng was probably at school in Peking in the years just before and after 1920. In 1923 he matriculated at Peking University. Except for a journey to Harbin in 1927 he remained in Peking until 1930.

Nothing is known of Feng's start as a poet except that his interest in poetry was awakened early and was stimulated to rapid maturity by contact with the avant-garde vernacular poetry movement centering around Peking University. At the university, Feng commenced the study of German under Yang Ping-cheng and later majored in German Hcerature. This interest seems to have led him into literary circles influenced by then-current German writers. In particular, he joined the staff of Ch'en-chung [the sunken bellj, a literary periodical which took its title from Gerhart Hauptmann's play Die Versunkene Glocke, and in 1925 he became its editor. Feng was writing poetry as early as 1923, when he composed the 16 poems of the cycle Kuei-hsiang [back home]. These poems concerned Feng's return to Chohsien for the new year's festivities of January 1923 and expressed his reluctance to leave the excitement of the city for the countryside. The collection was not published until 1929. In 1927 Feng published Tso-jih chih ho [songs of yesterday]. Notable in this first volume of verse were his love lyrics "Man-t'ien hsing-kuang" [a skyful of starlight], "Pieh K" [farewell to K], and "Ni" [you] and two narrative poems, "Changman" [the curtain] and "Ssu-men chih ch'ien" [by the temple gate]. The narrative poems received much critical acclaim, especially "Chang-man," the retelling of a Chinese folk legend of a pair of lovers who through a misunderstanding entered the life of the cloister. In 1928 Feng Chih published the poem cycle Pei-yu [journey to the north], which was based on his Manchurian excursion of the summer of 1927. In Pei-yu the narrative mode of such poems as "Chang-man" is replaced by a compelling personal note. The Manchurian poems reveal the despair of the young poet at the decadence of life in the great city and his intense sadness at the passing of youth. Feng's flight, however, seems to have been of little avail, and the cycle ends with a cold and gloomy vision of Harbin in the deep snow. Pei-yu was Feng's last major work for many years.

About 1928 Feng was graduated from the German department of Peking University. In the autumn of 1930 he set out for Germany to pursue his literary studies. Feng traveled overland by rail, probably through Siberia. He reported a fragment of this journey in the essay "Ch'ih-t'a i-hsi" [traveling west], which records a discussion on philosophy and religion which he had with two Soviet students and a German missionary. From 1930 to 1935 Feng studied at the University of Berlin and spent some time at Heidelberg. He received a Ph.D. from Berlin in 1935. Feng's writings during this period included a translation of Rilke's Briefe an den jungen Dichter {Letters to a Young Poet) undertaken in 1931, and "Sai-yin ho-p'ang-ti shao-nü" [the nameless girl by the Seine], which appeared in 1932 in Ch'en-chung. In 1932 Feng met Chu T^u-ch'ing (q.v.) for the first time and was much impressed by the elder poet's candor and humility. Feng returned to China in 1935 and became a member of the German department at Peking University. From 1935 to 1938 he was chiefly concerned with German literature. His translation and discussion of six poems of Friedrich Nietzsche appeared in Wen-hsueh [literature magazine] in 1937.

In 1938 the Sino-Japanese war interrupted Feng's quiet career as scholar and man of letters. He joined the general exodus of intellectuals to the southwest, arriving in Kunming late in the year to take up a teaching post at the newly established Southwest Associated University. The trek to Kunming aff"ected him deeply. He was impressed with both the resiliance of traditional Chinese life in the rural areas and the endurance of the average Chinese citizen. In an essay published in 1939, "Tsai Kan-chiang-shang" [on the Kan River], Feng movingly described the age-old practice of fishing by firelight, which, until war removed him from his normal life, he had known only from old books. In another essay written the same year, "I P'ing-lo" [I remember P'ing-lo], Feng described the imperturbable behavior of a tailor in P'inglo, Kiangsi, whose matter-of-fact calmness in getting his job of sewing done on time somehow symbolized the Chinese people bravely going about their business in the face of national crisis. These essays differ considerably in tone from the despair of Pei-yu, coupling a serene acceptance of hardship with a Rilke-like respect for "ordinary things." During his Kunming years (1938-46), Feng Chih continued his professorial career and also wrote what are generally considered to be his best poems. Feng taught German at Southwest Associated University and at T'ung-chi University, where he also acted as dean. His course on Goethe became famous. His translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, begun in Berlin, was published in 1938. Between 1931 and 1939 Feng had written very little poetry. In 1939 or 1 940, however, he seems to have had a profound, almost mystical, experience which thawed his frozen creativity. In gratitude for this experience and in an attempt to communicate it, he composed the 27 poems of his Shih-ssu-hang-shihchi [poems in 14 lines], published in 1941. Rilke's influence was quite apparent. Both the form of the poems and the circumstances of their composition recalled the German poet, whose Sonette an Orpheus {Sonnets to Orpheus) were composed in a brief period after he had produced very little work for over a decade. Like Rilke, Feng gave accurate descriptions of nature a metaphysical overtone. Feng's cavalcades of horses, his rivers, mountains, lonely pines, deserted streets, the utter solitude of lamplight, and the utter freedom of a stringless kite are described not directly for themselves but as occult and premonitory symbols of a world whose beauty can be glimpsed and described only by the poet. Technically, the sonnets demonstrated the possibility of applying a firm metric to vernacular poetry. The form was ideally suited to Feng's materials and allowed much variety and movement within the organizing framework. The poems caused a great stir and were much imitated by younger poets.

In 1941 Feng began to experience the real rigors of war with the inception of regular Japanese bombing of Kunming. One result of the bombings was frequent power failure, which made it impossible for Feng, who had to resort to using a dim lantern, to read any but classical books with large clear type. Accordingly, he devoted the remainder of the war years to the study of classical Chinese poetry. He produced a 1944 essay on the Sung patriot-poet Lu Yu (1 125-1209), which centered on the problem of inculcating a sense of duty in the educated man, and he developed an abiding interest in Tu Fu (712-770), a T'ang poet who had written his greatest poems in times of national crisis. The publication in 1942 of a translation by Pien Chih-lin of Rilke's novella Die IVeise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke stimulated Feng to use the same form in retelling the legend of Wu Tzu-hsu, a sixth-century B.C. hero who, rather than yielding to the tyranny of his father's murderer, chose exile and revenge. This work was published in 1944 and, as Feng stated in the preface, was meant to reflect the wartime suff"ering of the Chinese people and their eventual triumph.

Feng Chih returned to Peiping in the fall of 1946 and resumed teaching. At the same time, he became one of the editors of Hsien-tai wen-lu [modern writing]. In November 1946 he published an essay in Kuan-ch'a [the observer] entitled "Sha-lung" [salon], which, while seeming merely to detail the history of the European literary salon, was actually a sharp satire on contemporary Chinese letters. In both theme and style this essay marked a new departure in Feng's writing. In 1947 he published long articles on Tu Fu and on Faust in Wen-hsueh tsa-chih [literature magazine]. A third article, entitled "Chueh-tuan" [decision] also appeared in Wen-hsueh tsa-chih in 1947. In this article Feng examined the existential significance of "decision" as conceived by Kierkegaard, and he concluded with a prophecy ofimminent all-encompassing change for China. In 1948 Feng wrote "P'i-p'ing yü lun-chan" [criticism and polemic], which further illustrated his growing preoccupation with the position of the committed writer in a period of political and ideological unrest.

The three articles "Sha-lung," "Chuehtuan," and "P'i-p'ing yü lun-chan," together with the earlier study of Lu Yu, sketch out Feng Chih's transformation from a scholar and meditative poet to a committed writer of definite political views and prepare for his wholesale acceptance of Marxist literary values after 1949. When Feng joined the new regime is not clear, but in 1950 he went to Europe under Communist auspices as a member of the ^Ven-lien [the writers union] and revisited many of the places he had known in the 1930's. Out of this trip grew his volume of essays Tung-ou tsa-chi [notes on Eastern Europe], published in 1950. In 1952 his long interest in Tu Fu culminated in the publication of his Tu Fu chuan [life of Tu Fu], a work of sound scholarship generally regarded as the best piece of biographical writing done in China in recent years. After 1949 Feng continued to publish short patriotic poems in an uncomplicated style and a few translations, notably of Heine. His most famous recent works include "Han Po k'an ch'ai" [Han Po chops wood] of 1952, in which the ghost of a maltreated wood-chopper is avenged by a popular rising against the timber owners, and "Wo ko-ch'ang An-kang" [I sing of Anshan steel] of 1953-55, in which Chinese steel is hymned as the basis of a new society and lasting peace. In 1953 Feng became secretary of the Union of Chinese Writers. As an official spokesman on literary art, he espoused a doctrinaire position on socialist realism and publicly repudiated his 1941 sonnets and the "decadent" poetry of Rilke. In 1953 he was elected a member of the national committee of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. In 1954 he was elected a deputy from Honan to the First National People's Congress. The following year, he became a member of the division of philosophy and social sciences of the Academy of Sciences.

Feng Chih's views on the goals and techniques of socialist verse are summed up in "Man-t'an hsin-shih-ti nu-li fang-hsiang" [random observations on the future of the new poetry] , which appeared in Wen-i pao [literary bulletin] in 1958, and "Kuan-yü hsin-shih-ti hsing-shih wen-t'i" [on the form and structure of the new poetry], published in 1959 in Wen-i p'ing-lun [literary critique]. In 1959 Feng also published a volume of new verse, Shih-nien shih-ch'ao [poems of the last ten years], and a selection of older writings, Feng Chih shih-wen hsuan-chi [selected poems and essays of Feng Chih] .

Feng was married to Yao K'o-k'un, who was a translator.