Young Grass Sprouting on the Wasteland The Reboot of Taiwan Modernist Poetry in the Early Post- War Period through Chan Bing's Poems

This paper explores how Taiwan modernist poetry was "rebooted" across and beyond the WWII through Chan Bing's poems in the 1940s. In the history of Taiwan poetry, there seems to be a gap of modernist poetry in the early postwar period, caught between the Le Moulin Poetic Society of the 1930s and the Modernist Poetic Society of the 1950s. However, we can see from Chan Bing's example that this is not the case. When studying in wartime Japan from 1940 to 1944, Chan Bing published poems influenced by Japanese poet Horiguchi Daigaku in the Japanese literary magazine Wakakusa (Young Grass). After the war, he used intellectual poetic language to explore themes such as "war" and "death" in newspapers such as China Daily and the Silver Bell Society's Tide from 1946 to 1948. Therefore, he is considered a poet who is close to the ideas of the Japanese modernist poetry group Arechi-ha (Wasteland School, a group influenced by Eliot's The Waste Land). Through Chan Bing's poems published in Japan and Taiwan from pre-war to post-war in the 1940s, this paper explores the significance and value of Chan Bing's reboot of modernist poetry in the early post-war period.