What are we to think of Chairman Mao? A man of immense
contradictions—a nationalist, communist, revolutionary, warrior,
as well as the author of The Little Red Book, and the leader for
decades of the Peoples’ Republic of China—he was also one of
twentieth-century China’s best poets. A new translation of his
work provides an opportunity to evaluate him as a writer and as
an artist. A reviewer in The Washington Post called Mao’s poems
“political documents,” but added, “it is as literature that they
should be considered.” Separating the political from the
literary, however, isn’t possible. “We woke a million workers
and peasants,” Mao wrote in the “First Siege,” and though all
his lines aren’t as explicit about the Chinese Revolution as it
is, a great many of them are. Born into a peasant family in
1893, Mao grew up loving the classics of Chinese literature and
at times, he could be enlightened about culture. “Questions of
right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled
through free discussion in arti