Wild Grass (Yecao)

Lu Xun's 1927 prose-poetry collection

Tradition: Modern Chinese literature

Lu Xun's 1927 prose-poetry collection

Wild Grass (Yecao, 野草, 1927) is Lu Xun's prose-poetry collection — twenty-three short prose-poems composed 1924-1926 and serialised in the journal Yusi (Threads of Talk) before book publication. The collection is Lu Xun's most experimental literary work and his nearest approach to high-modernist abstraction. Where the short-story collections (Call to Arms, Wandering) anatomise Chinese feudal-modern society from a partly-external clinical perspective, Wild Grass turns inward — onto Lu Xun's own dreams, nightmares, philosophical despairs, and the texture of mid-1920s political-existential crisis. The book's most-anthologised pieces — 'The Shadow's Leave-taking,' 'The Passer-by,' 'Dead Fire,' 'After Death,' 'Such a Fighter,' 'Amid Pale Bloodstains' — are short symbolic prose-poems whose lineage runs from Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose through Russian (Turgenev's prose poems) and Japanese (Sōseki's Yumejūya, Ten Nights of Dreams) modernist precedents. Wild Grass's themes are mortality, the meaninglessness of action, the persistence of nihilism beside hope, the writer's solitude. The Preface (Tici) — 'I love my wild grass, but I hate the ground that bears it' — became one of the most-quoted passages in modern Chinese literature. Wild Grass has continually attracted both literary-critical attention (as Lu Xun's modernist experiment) and philosophical-existential commentary (as documentation of mid-1920s nihilism-and-hope coexistence). The collection's status grew with the post-Mao reassessment that recovered Lu Xun beyond his Maoist-canonisation; Wang Hui's Resisting Despair: Lu Xun's Mental Struggle (1991) treats Wild Grass as central. The work remains foundational to modern Chinese poetics.