My dissertation is a comparative analysis of the juncture at which Chinese poetry became “modern.” The catalyst for this development was the early twentieth-century translation into Chinese of the European Romantics, which was contemporaneous with changes and permutations within the “herbs and beauty” myth crucial to the conception of the Chinese poet. I argue that the convergence of the two serve as an anchor for examining China’s literary responses, in both form and content, to drastic social change brought about by rapid modernization and dramatic revolutions. Through a diverse selection of written and visual texts, I scrutinize and accentuate two ambivalences that, I argue, China’s struggle for modernity required and to which the “herbs and beauty” myth gives form. On the one hand, I locate a moment when the essential femininity of the traditional Chinese poet (man or woman) came to be displaced onto the Western new woman, as the Southern Society, a large community of Chinese poets in the early 20th century, revamped the “herbs and beauty” allegory through their project of translating the European Romantics into Chinese. On the other hand, I investigate how modern Chinese poets and intellectuals, torn between their residual attachment to a hallowed national literary tradition and their new quest for non-indigenous (European) sources, partook in the difficult moments of China’s modern transformation by constantly redefining the interconnections between the beautiful and the virtuous through translation and transcultural relation. In each instance in question, the influence of translation causes a shift in modes of representation that require new definitions of what it means to be a poet in an increasingly unspiritual and commodified world: together, these examples enable me to conceptualize the poetics and politics of what I call “translated affect” and “affective modernity.” / 10000-01-01