This paper deals with the interrelationship between poetry and reality in Taiwan earlier poetry. A brief historical survey accompanied with aesthetic discussion covers the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s poetry. The paper dwells much space on the insufficiency of “poetry as teleology” in 70’s “local color” writings. Poems written in this period has tremendous social concern, as a counter-movement of the preceding period. And yet this ethic function is developed often at the expense of aesthetics. The paper also dixusses tow different kinds of realilty among poets. Those of “here and now” and those of “there and then.” The former is what makes a local colorist; the latter is what makes a mainlander who regards himself as an exile in Taiwan. The former has “sincere” concern with the place he lives and yet often reduces his writings to teleological tools; the latter demonstrates aesthetic values and yet in his writings betakes himself to nostalgia for a lost time and space with little emotional or ideological involvement with his present living surroundings in Taiwan.
