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    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All"
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All"
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All"
    Ebook41 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535817851
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "All" - Gale

      11

      All

      Bei Dao

      1990

      Introduction

      Although Bei Dao has been publishing poetry in his native China since the 1970s, it was 1990 before his poem All was published in English. All appeared in The August Sleepwalker, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and released by New Directions simultaneously with Bei Dao's short-story collection Waves. Since the early 1970s, he has been known for his imaginative and avant-garde poetry as well as for his political activism. He was a member of the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s, and his most famous poem, The Answer, which was written during that period, became an anthem of dissent during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Although Bei Dao strenuously disavows that he was a leader of any movement, particularly a political movement, it was in part because his poetry was used as political anthem that he was exiled in 1989 and has never been allowed to return to China. In the intervening years, Bei Dao has continued to write; seven collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, and two collections of essays have been published in English translation. All is one of Bei Dao's early poems, written sometime between 1970 and 1989. (The poems in The August Sleepwalker are not identified by date.) Like many of Bei Dao's poems, All relies on highly personal imagery, which is in part why the Chinese government viewed it as a politically subversive poem. In a political system in which all thoughts, feelings, and needs of the individual were supposed to be subordinated to the state, Bei Dao's insistence in his work on the legitimacy of the individual experience marked him as both artistically and politically progressive.

      Author Biography

      Bei Dao was born Zhao Zhenkai on August 2, 1949, in Beijing, mere months before the People's Republic of China came into being. His was a prominent family, and he went to the best schools. In the 1960s, like many students, Bei Dao joined the Red Guards—a student movement in China's Cultural Revolution—and participated in Mao Zedong's civilwar against anyone declared amember of the liberal bourgeoisie. Bei Dao became disillusioned with the violent tactics of the Red Guards and was banished to the countryside, where he spent eleven years employed as a construction worker. During the Cultural Revolution, all literature on subjects other than Marxism and Mao's thoughts were banned. In an interview with Siobahn LaPiana for the Journal of the International Institute, Bei Dao explained, Not only did I go into houses to look for things, I also organized the stealing of books from the libraries, because the libraries were all closed at that time.

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