Every year I visit my mentor, Mr. Cheng Min, but in 2021, I was unable to make the trip. In September, when I was working at the Zhuhai Campus of Beijing Normal University, I received a WeChat message from Mr. Zheng Min's daughter And Wei Jie, informing me that my husband was admitted to the ICU of the Third Hospital of Beijing Medical College due to illness, and my heart suddenly tightened and I was anxious. However, people are far away, and the hospital cannot visit during the epidemic, feeling helpless. After returning to Beijing, I learned from Tong Weijie that Mr. Tong's treatment created a medical miracle, the condition was alleviated, and I was admitted to the general ward, my mood was slightly relaxed, and I thought, Heaven bless Mr. And let Mr. Tong get through the difficulties, I will definitely be able to talk to her again about the love between teachers and students. However, fate is ultimately merciless! The next day in 2022, my husband's condition was critical. That night, I was ordered to write a brief biography of mr. Life, and while writing, I recalled the seven years I spent with him, no, more than 30 years of good times, and recalled mr. Li's teachings to me, this kindness, which will never be forgotten. In the early morning of the 3rd, my husband embarked on a long journey, and my heart was broken and I was in a trance. In the end, I was unable to see the last side of Mr. Shang, which became my lingering regret, but Mr. Shang's spirit will always remain in my heart, and she will become that dazzling star, forever illuminating my steps forward.
In the summer and autumn of 1987, I entered Mr. Zheng Min's door to study for her master's degree. At that time, I didn't know much about mr., only that she was a famous "Nine Leaf School" poet in china, and I only knew a little about the "Nine Leaf School" poetry, and I had not read much of their poems. At that time, I was somewhat in awe of my husband. He gave us a course every semester, including "English Literature", "Contemporary American Poetry", and "Introduction to Deconstructivism". In the course "English Literature", he talks about the works of Shakespeare, John Dorne, Wordsworth, Eliot and others. Mr. Li never instills concepts in his lectures, and any judgment made from the perspective of others gives way to the perception derived from the work itself. She took us to read Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar", starting from the lines of different characters, making an in-depth analysis of each line, allowing us to feel the richness and unique charm of Shakespeare's language, and carefully excavating the multi-faceted and complex characters in the play, which left a very deep impression on me. At that time, most of the domestic academic circles' comments on literary works were more general analysis of the theme and artistic characteristics of the works, and the judgment of the character image was relatively simple, or positive or negative, and the dualistic and opposing thinking mode was still dominating the path of literary criticism, while Mr. Wang's analysis could dig aside the text appearance to explore the hidden complexity and multi-faceted nature of the language, so as to see the other side of the character image. You can not accept her point of view, but you cannot ignore the depth, thickness and richness behind the language, and do not explore the flow of thoughts, inner contradictions and struggles in the character's subconscious. This is the first lesson I learned from my husband. Mr. Dorne's poetry, starting from the secret, contradiction and speculative nature of the work, takes us to read Eliot's criticism of Dorne's poetry, lets us see the broadness and depth of poetry, and feel the philosophy and profundity of poetry. In the 1980s, Dorne's poetry was not yet involved in China's academic circles, and the study of Dorne can be said to be almost blank. His lecture opened up a new world for us. At the end of the second year of graduate school, I combined my husband's explanation with some existing materials in China at that time to write a paper on Dorne's poetry, which mr. believed was well written and recommended it to the Foreign Literary Review, which was the first academic paper I published. In this way, under the guidance of Mr. Li, I embarked on the road of English poetry research for the first time, which embodied Mr. Li's painstaking efforts and academic thoughts.
During the three-year master's study, my classmates and I pedaled our bicycles every week to my home in Tsinghua Garden. In class, we accompanied the fragrance of the garden under the window of Mr. Mr. Study, leaned on the bookshelf filled with English books in Mr. Study, and listened to Mr. Li's teachings, and the soft voice sounded like a natural sound that knocked on my ignorant heart. During this period, I also got to know mr. in depth and got to know him. Her wise thoughts, flexible poetry, rigorous academic attitude, and equal academic exchanges with students have made me emotionally and psychologically close to mr. limelight, and I have a deeper perception of his creative experience and academic thoughts. In fact, Mr. Li's teaching has always run through the idea of mutual reference and mutual penetration of poetry and philosophy that she has pursued all her life, and also contains her profound humanistic feelings and the spirit of skepticism and criticism of intellectuals.
Her poetry began in the early 1940s, when her poetry established its place in the history of the development of new poetry in China. When she first wrote poetry, she was a philosophy student at Southwest United University, she was taught the philosophical ideas of Mr. Feng Youlan, Tang Yongtong, Zheng Xin, etc., and in terms of poetry, she benefited more from Mr. Feng Zhi, who taught German, it can be said that in Mr. Zheng Min, poetry and philosophy have been inseparable from the two sides of the same body from the beginning. In 1948, he embarked on a journey to study in a foreign country, studying English literature at Brown University in the United States, and his master's thesis was dojone's love poems. Since then, in addition to writing poetry, Mr. Li has begun to explore poetic theory. However, poetry and poetics had to be shelved in the special era after her return to her homeland. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after 30 years away from poetry, she set sail again, and she not only sang the poems in her heart again, but also played the sonatas of poetic criticism, and also played the colorful movements of philosophical theory. In 1982, he published her first academic research book, Studies in Anglo-American Poetry and Drama. It can be seen from this that Mr. Li's early critical thought paid more attention to structural analysis methods, while structuralist criticism was still unknown in the domestic criticism circles at that time. However, Mr. Li never saw the structure of poetry as a rigid framework. Her research on contemporary American poetry also adopts the perspective of structural analysis, but also cracks the stereotypical poetic structure, explores and excavates the connotation of poetry with the deep structure of poetry, and touches the unconscious deep inner of poetry, indicating her abandonment and transcendence of structural thinking, which is quite advanced in poetry research and poetic concepts at that time. She gave us lectures with these novel ideas and inspired us to think innovatively, and she often said, "Without innovation, there is no scholarship." Research and exploration are to not fall into the trap of the predecessors, not to blindly follow the existing academic views, to be good at discovering problems, and to have the courage to question.
In 1985, she was invited to the United States to give a lecture, and not only read a lot of contemporary American poetry, but also came into contact with the deconstructivist philosophical trend represented by the French philosopher Derrida, which had a huge impact on her thinking. She recognized that after World War II, the Western intellectual circles had gradually moved out of the confines of metaphysical rationality supremacy and monism, opened up the concept of thinking that dissolved the absolute center and duality, advocated eternal change and movement, and advocated the pluralistic symbiosis of cultures. The philosophies and poetic thoughts that had previously been contained in Mr. Li's mind beyond the concept of structural thinking now resonated strongly with deconstructivist thought. She combines the anglo-American postmodern poetry creation concept with deconstructed thinking and Freud's theory of the unconscious to think and explore, focusing on the "unconscious" and "open form" in poetry, and expressing the poetic philosophy of "not being there". At the same time, she also integrated these philosophies and poetic reflections with the spirit of classical Chinese philosophy, and immersed them in her unique and emotional poetry creation, so that her poetry in the late 1980s further opened up to deep philosophical thought, showing a richer and deeper spiritual connotation, and her poetic thought was also deepened and enriched with the spread of deconstructivist philosophical views in her spiritual realm. In the 1990s, she published a series of articles that aroused widespread discussion in the domestic poetry circles, Chinese studies circles, and theoretical circles, and published academic monographs such as Structure-Deconstruction Perspective: Language, Culture, and Review (1998), "Poetry and Philosophy are Close Neighbors: Structure-Deconstructed Poetics" (1999), "Thinking, Culture, And Poetics" (2004), reflecting on the development of Western poetry in the contemporary and future, reflecting on the problems existing in New Chinese poetry, and exploring the potential of Chinese in today's poetics and aesthetics. Proposing the pluralism and openness of thinking in the perspective of deconstructing philosophy... These reflections are not only reflected in her papers and academic monographs of this period, but also throughout her teaching. The Western poetry, Chinese poetry, contemporary American poetry, and of course deconstructivist theory that she teaches all exude the transcendence of dualistic and opposing thinking concepts, reflection and criticism of centrism and monism. My master's thesis, "On the Discordant Sound of the View of Nature in Wordsworth's Poetry," was inspired by this deconstructive view of thinking.
In 1990, I studied for a ph.D. and followed him on a new journey of study. Entering the doctoral stage, sir asked me to study the philosophical theory of deconstructionism. At the master's level, I took the course "Introduction to Deconstructivism" taught by my husband, and I also read some related books and articles, and I learned a little about Derrida's deconstructivism theory. But sir asked me to study philosophy, which was too difficult for me, and I had a certain fear of difficulties. But Mr. Said, "Without philosophy as a foundation, the study of poetry cannot be deepened." He studied philosophy and was convinced of Heidegger's famous saying that "poetry and philosophy are close neighbors." I heeded his advice and honestly followed him for four years to read the works of philosophers such as Derrida, Paul de Mann, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. When I first entered the door of philosophy, I felt that philosophy was very difficult. However, sir did not ask me to read a lot, but to understand the profundity and breadth of philosophical thought by means of in-depth discussion and slow chewing. At that time, I still pedaled to my husband's house every week for classes, and the two of us sat opposite each other, and I read a passage from Derrida's original book, and he explained to me the meaning. She can expound Derrida's profound thoughts in a popular and simple way, which integrates a lot of Chinese Lao Zhuang philosophy, and the wisdom in ancient Eastern philosophical thought and Western contemporary philosophy often collide with dazzling sparks, which makes me feel open-minded and thoughtful. Gradually, I was attracted by the intellectuality that burst out of the intersection of eastern and western ideas, and the emotion of fear gradually dissipated, and I was led by my husband into a more extensive and broad universe of thought, and was fascinated by the magnificence of it, and it turned out that philosophy can be so full of seductive charm! In the end, under my husband's leadership, I chose "Language and Epistemology: Derrida's Deconstructivist Criticism" as the topic of my doctoral dissertation research. The way Sir mentored my master's and doctoral dissertations was unique, she didn't look at my papers, but listened. I read my paper aloud to her sentence by sentence, she listened carefully, and when she found that something was wrong, she immediately stopped, and then we talked about where the problem was, how to revise it, and sometimes the paper manuscript was read several times until she listened to it and felt that there was no problem. This way of guiding the thesis by sir actually facilitated the conversation and discussion between us, and the problem was resolved and deepened in this discussion, and it also led to the close interaction between me and mr. Li, the exchange of thoughts.
In the days after completing my doctoral studies, I often went to her husband's house to visit her, saying that I was visiting, but in fact I hoped that he would remind him from time to time not to be lazy in his studies, not to be lazy in his thinking, and not to be numb to learning. Whenever I went to talk to my husband, he always asked me very kindly and directly: "What problem are you thinking about now?" I went to visit her before I went abroad for further study, and she told me to "be sure to go with questions, see what others are studying, thinking about, come back and study our real problems, and don't always read books with a boring head." Her point of view is that now is the information age, the books to be read can never be read, the information to be collected can never be collected, our brains are not reservoirs, but excavators, to creatively find problems, think about problems, explore problems. Sitting in front of my husband, I listened to her talk about her sharp and flexible thoughts, sometimes communicating with her, sometimes she talked endlessly, often unconsciously, for several hours, and she was never tired. She is a poet, a scholar, but also a thinker and a wise man, and the problems she ponders never end. She often said, "My life is to keep thinking, not being able to think, life has no meaning to me." "She thinks about Chinese and Western poetry, Chinese, education, culture, environment, war, politics, history... Sometimes, my husband and I had a good conversation and left me at home for dinner. The habit of eating at the gentleman's house is to divide meals, each person brings a plate, the plate contains the meal they want to eat, and then we carry the plate, eating and talking in the study or in the living room. Out of my husband's house, my mind seemed to receive an electric shock, constantly jumping with flashes from the sky.
For life and death, Mr. Li's attitude is always transparent, and she especially agrees with the idea of change in deconstructive thinking, believing that life itself is a process, in which everything is changing, and only with change can there be progress and development. In her early poems, she showed her thinking about the individual, integrating the "I" into the larger things, the poem "Loneliness" is the poetic embodiment of the self and all things, and until her later poem "The Last Birth", she integrated the self into the grand universe:
I know I'm done
Final Birth:
A tiny particle again
Floating in the body of the Mother of the Universe
I'm not gone.
From a distant galaxy
I'm listening to humanity
……
"Let's sing together
That immortal Ode to Joy! ”
I know
They still have
A long way to go.
In the face of death, the "I" of the gentleman became a particle and a star in the heavens, and became one with mankind and the firmament, reaching the highest state of life. The English poet Wordsworth longed for the body to temporarily stop breathing, to make the soul into living life, so as to gain insight into the essence of life; the American poetess Dickinson saw life as a process with death, and that leisurely but busy life was accompanied by death to eternal life. The gentleman's poetry goes further, because she can always see and perceive another existence in the emptiness, which brings poetry and thought, and brings life into the eternity of oneness with mankind.
Sir traveled far, but not far away, our hearts were closer, because every day we breathed the breath of her life, soaked in the sowing of her soul, felt her non-existent existence, and her life had stepped into the long river of mankind and entered the vast universe!
Her spirit is eternal!
![Centenarian poet with her Alice[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)