Abstract:

The "pure poetry" represents a way to know the world by the mind. It seeks a supreme aesthetic sphere and an artistic ideal of pure beauty, appreciating the world with the visual image that is invisible, the loud voice that is unhearable, and the great beauty that is unutterable. The twentieth-century Chinese poems have found the Chinese nation's cultural memories of pure art traditions from French symbolist "pure poems" so as to look for diverse possibilities of poetical modernity. The desti ny of Chinese-style "pure poetry" has suggested that the road of modern poetry returning to literature as such in China in the twentieth century was really a rather arduous cultural journey.

Key words: the twentieth century, pure poetry, pure artistic ideal, symbolism