Metaphors unto themselves: Mental illness poetics in contemporary Chinese poetry

Recently, proponents of the critical medical humanities have recommended a more discerning view of the ways in which genres and forms “speak” to and for illness, looking specifically at cultural and historical dimensions and cultural specificities of idioms of distress rather than at transhistorical and transcultural approaches. These two claims for a genre-specific critique and, in this case, a cross-cultural approach, ground my reading of the work of Chinese poets Guo Lusheng (Indexfinger; b. 1948) and Wen Jie (b. 1963), diagnosed with schizophrenia and clinical depression, respectively. The study uncovers a lyrical voice that takes shape in the poets’ illness-related content, but also in the formal aspects of the Chinese poetic tradition. I argue that the delight of writing poetry lies less in the attempt to express a subjective experience than in finding the devices and forms that integrate an individual experience into a collective form of “illness poetics.”