“Xiaoya”(1936) was the magazine launched between “Modern”(1932) and “New Poetry”(1936) in the 1930s and is considered to have provided an important stage for the development of modernism of the new poetry. “Xiaoya”, the only contemporary modern poetry magazine in the Huabei area at the time, actively published magazines under the editorial policies of Wu Benxing and Li Zhangbo, Due. However, “Xiaoya” has disappeared into the backdrop of history with a short history of less than a year after Sino-Janpanese War.
How would the editors of “Xiaoya” want to build their “poetry garden”? In this article, I reviewed the contents of the editor’s message, “Yi de zhai’s Notes of Poetry”, which was created by using the blank space between the advertisement and the works in the magazine.
First of all, “Xiaoya” showed intimate relationships between the poetry world that they were aiming for and the different magazines through poetry introductions and magazine advertisements. Although “Xiaoya” did not include any commercial advertisements, the exception was the promotion of poetry and magazine advertisements, most of which were major ‘modern’ poets of the 1930s.
Also, through the “Yi de zhai’s Notes of Poetry” box located in the blank space between works, what the “Xiaoya” was aimed for was repeatedly emphasized. And it was summarized the pursuit of the implicit and sincere poetry, and the opposition to the Hu Shi’s vernacular style and the long poems. In accordance with this editorial policy, the works were presented with true-hearted works using implicit theorists, and no ‘Hu Shi’s vernacular style’ was found in the “Xiaoya”.