Lu Xun, one of the most intelligent and most original of the May 4th intellectuals in China, joined the Chinese branch of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930 (the League was part of or affiliated with or at least sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party; not sure) but hated it and left because he said the Soviet idea of a perfect poem went like this:

Oh, steam whistle!
Oh, Lenin!

From Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, (1990; 1999 edition; damned if I remember the page number.) Spence says that Lu Xun refused to join the CCP and until his death in 1936 told the young Chinese writers to maintain a sense of Chinese culture, of social problems/conditions, and of the ridiculous.

Hannah Arendt in a casual footnote: 'The common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.’ (The Human Condition, p. 242)

I miss talking to you, you know? *rueful* After all that. That's what they say in stories, isn't it, that it's the little things that matter, in the end. Things like: we baked pie for thanksgiving! (Thanksgiving, what a wonderful name for a holiday. Someone told me that in Chinese it's gan en jie. There were about 10 of us at the dinner table and maybe 2 Americans and at the beginning of the meal the host (a Yugoslav herself) said, shall we say something? give thanks? and we all looked at each other.) Or: they've wrapped the trees in fairylights and if I stand up now I can see them outside the window, all golden and enchanted. Or: when asked what he thought about Freud, Max Beerbohm replied, 'A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?' Or: I have egg and sweetcorn pudding leftovers. I think you'd like it; you like sweetcorn don't you? I have half a tray of it in my room still. Or: I miss talking to you, you know?