Taiwan poetry has the clear prototype from the inception. It strongly and truly reflects the isolated Taiwan island feature. Poets are highly sensitive to any change such as heterogeneous political system, twisted society, unfair treatment and phenomenon of struggling for life…etc. Poets observe these kinds of movements, try to put some flesh and spirits on the poetry, and develop their unique styles. From the commencement of Taiwanese contemporary literal revolution in 1920, since then the development until now is quite drastic. As far as politics is concerned, Taiwan went through Japanese colony and KMT ruling. It started from Bai‐ha wen, vernacular Chinese, changed to Japanese language in July, 1937 and ended with the abolition of Japanese after the second retrocession from the end of the war. After the war, Taiwan underwent the 228 Incident, White terror, and long period of imposition of martial law…etc. The national government had a yen to conquer Mainland China to unite through The Three Principle of the People. Over the decades of development, a new poetry has more significant value in history and society than it in literature.
While Taiwan was developed and modernized, absorbing the western culture and capitalization, it also struggled to the traditional value, ethnics and conflict between Taiwan and Chinese knot. In addition, a series of controversial issues, such as (1) the status and the role of Taiwanese literal writers, (2) the link between literal work and society and (3) the meanings of outputs …etc oppresses overwhelmingly the literati than before. Especially, it”s worthy of more special attention on the late 90”s works after the martial law was lifted.
Due to the high performance of poetry in metaphor, simile and contrast, poetry under the protection of these literal features progress earlier and more smoothly than the politics and society. The poetry per se also successively keeps the Taiwanese subjective consciousness. More importantly, it builds up the national valuable concept and ideal prototype. Before encouraging Taiwanese with the possession of subjectivity, first of all we should know what the subjectivity is. Next, from the perspectives of culture, literature and history we should analyze the reasons of losing Taiwanese subjectivity and understand the importance of subjectivity. Apart from these, we should also discuss how Taiwan subjectivity should tie a knot to globe, making it clear that Taiwan is part of the world.
On this article, we cannot probe too deeply into every issues, but only focus on small parts. Those are analyzing and observing the shift of poetic works based on the local poetry of Li as well as the movement of consciousness before and after the martial law was lifted.