Thơ thơ () is a Vietnamese love poem collection authored by Xuân Diệu as his debut work. It consisted of 46 poems, and was published in December 1938 by the Đời nay Publishing House.
Considered as one of Xuân Diệu's magna opera, Thơ thơ introduced themes such as individuality, the irreversibility of time, infatuation, and Western perceptions of romance to Vietnamese poetry. It was seen by many Vietnamese critics and literary researchers as a prominent focal point of 19th-century French romanticist and symbolist influence on Vietnamese poetry, particularly through the works of Charles Baudelaire, and helped earned Xuân Diệu's title of being "the newest of the New Poets".
Background
Between 1932 and 1945, Vietnamese poetry was introduced to the intellectual-led Thơ mới ("New Poetry") movement, which aimed to introduce free verse poetry to counter against perceived restrictions of poetic and emotional expression in the more traditional đường luật poems. Around this time, as Vietnam was under French colonial control, the movement was heavily influenced by the French symbolist and romanticist movements, and particularly from the works of poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1937, Xuân Diệu joined the Self-Reliant Literary Group, a left-wing literary society that was the primary site of development for the New Poetry movement.
List of poems
References
Bibliography
[An era in poetry]
[Xuân Diệu and Baudelaire]
External links The collection on thivien.net