Bian Zhilin
Bian Zhilin (1910–2000) was a Chinese poet, translator and literature researcher. He was born on December 8, 1910, in Haimen, Jiangsu, and died on December 2, 2000, at age 89. He used the pen name Ji Ling.
In 1929 he studied in the English department at Peking University and began writing poetry, influenced by English Romantic and French Symbolist poetry. In 1936 he helped publish The Han Garden Collection with Li Guangtian and He Qifang. His poetry was tied to the Crescent School of modern poets, but his style leaned toward Chinese symbolism. He also coedited the magazine New Poems with Dai Wangshu.
His early poems reflected his thoughts on society as a young intellectual, with quick perception and sometimes hard-to-understand, melancholic moods. During the Second Sino-Japanese War he taught at Sichuan University and at the National Southwestern Associated University. In 1938–1939 he visited Yan’an and Taihangshan and taught at Lu Xun’s Institute of Art and Literature.
He published A Selection of 10 Years’ Poetry (1930–1939) in 1941 (released in 1942). He taught at Nankai University in 1946, and in 1949 he became a professor in the Foreign Languages Department at Peking University. From 1964 he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:02 (CET).