Battle of words over the future of poetry

The ability to write verse may be a dying art in modern China but the Internet is providing lines of inspiration for a new generation. Zhang Yuchen reports.

It may mark a turning point for China's traditional publishing houses that they have no plans to publish the works of last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, despite having printed the collections of previous laureates. Some might argue that it is an indication the world is becoming more crude, more cynical and less appreciative of issues, such as nature, that the 80-year-old focuses on.

It certainly seems in some quarters that poetry has no hold on many people today. A survey in November showed poets are among the bottom three in a list of relationship partners in a country with about 3,000 years of history of writing poems.