Abstract: To compare China's New Cultural Movement to Europe's Renaissance aims at finding a totalizing Chinese form of "speech/writing" that may be equivalent to the Western counterpart, and the way to achieve it is to build on the transformation of language from classical Chinese to vernacular as a breakthrough. However, the long-established "lyrical" tradition in Chinese literature and the genre system which orthodoxizes poetry have no capacity to endow a spiritual form that can correspond to the narrative of the modern. The Vernacular Poetry fails to extend the tradition of poeticization in Chinese literature and to appropriate the specific truth-pursuing function in foreign modern poetry, which leads to the eventual decline of the poeticness of Chinese literature. On the other hand, the vernacular belles-lettres, inspired by the late Ming Dynasty essays and European essays, provides a feasible path to "con-formation" for modern literature, with which the "poetic" tradition of Chinese literature has been renewed and reconstructed.

Key words: Renaissance, vernacular Chinese, poeticness, belles-lettres