The Poems of Mao Tse-Tung

The poems of this collection are not the product of an elder statesman's leisure; as written in the introduction "Mao has written poems obsessively, during years of wandering and living in caves, writing all night, evening after evening, and then throwing away his 'scribbles.'" The poems themselves, conservative in terms of Chinese versification, are expressions of the decades of struggle, of the terrible loss of his first wife, of the hope for a new China, the organization of the Red Army, the 6,000 mile Long March, the ultimate victory over the Nationalistic forces. Aside from their obvious political interest, Mao's poems are simply very beautiful in their own right.