Now his tomb and embalmed body in Beijing are just another tourist attraction. And no longer do millions of Chinese study or wave aloft the famous "Little Red Book" of Quotations from Chairman Mao. Along with the political writing, Mao wrote poetry as well—poems about the revolution, the Red Army, poems about nature. Willis Barnstone has translated some of Mao's work and considers him an original master, one of China's most important poets. "Had he not been a revolutionary, perhaps his poetry would not have been as interesting because his personal poetry was the history of China. At the same time because he was a famous revolutionary and leader, it has prejudiced most people, almost correctly, to dismiss his poetry as simply the work of a man who achieved fame elsewhere." "But his work was not dismissed within China though?" "Well, now it's almost consciously forgotten. But when I was there in '72, you could see his poems on every dining room wall, engraved on peach-pits ... During lunch hours, workers would study his poems. They were every place." "Is there, though, a revisionist thinking within literary circles? Are people saying Mao wasn't any good as a poet either?" "No. Well, at least in my conversations in the year I recently spent in Peking teaching at the university there, I found very few people who didn't think he was a very good poet. But they did feel that his suggestions which were that people not write in the classical style, that they write in what he called the modern style, was very repressive. And as a result, of course, the restriction of publication during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, poetry was abysmal." "When you say the modern style, would that be, for example, free verse?" "It would be free verse as opposed to classical rhymes or classical forms." "You write in the introduction to one of your translations of poems of Mao Tsetong that people ... you explain that leaders in China, and indeed in the a East, are expected to be accomplished poets."
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