A Many-Fingered Thing

Classic poetry, a favorite preoccupation of scholars, has been in low repute in China since the advent of Communism. The subtle ideograms of the poet's traditional language have little in common with the blunt ideologies of modern Marxism, and for that reason China's top Communist, Mao Tse-tung, has long had to dissemble the fact that he is a workaday poet himself.

In recent months, however, Mao's China, desperately in need of brain power, has spread the word that the old, traditionally trained scholars it used to hector are not so bad after all. "Let diverse schools of thought contend," was the way the official policymakers put it. Last week, in line with the effort to make the classics acceptable, humble Chinese were getting a look at 18 of Mao's own classic poems, all set out in a new poetry magazine. "There is nothing outstanding about them," said Mao modestly, "but since you consider the poems publishable, let us proceed."

Sample Mao classic, written during the famed Red "long march" to Yenan:

Skies high and clouds sparse,

The eye encompasses the end of the horizon.

He who does not reach the great wall is not a man.

A mere count of the fingers reveals twenty thousand miles covered.

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