About Xuân Diệu
Ngô Xuân Diệu was a Vietnamese poet, journalist, short-story writer, and literary critic, best known as one of the prominent figures of the twentieth-century Thơ mới Movement. Heralded by critics as "the newest of the New Poets", Xuân Diệu rose to popularity with the collection Thơ thơ (1938), which demonstrates a distinct voice influenced by Western literature, notably French symbolism. Between 1936 and 1944, his poetry was characterized by a desperation for love, juxtaposed with a desire to live and to experience the beauty of the world. After joining the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1945, the themes of his works shifted towards the Party and their resistance against the French and the Americans. When he died in 1985, he left behind about 450 poems, as well as several short stories, essays, and literary criticisms. When a ten-year-old boy named Trần Đăng Khoa from Hải Dương Province gained attention with his flair for poetry, Xuân Diệu himself went to meet the boy and offered to proofread his first poetry collection. In the last two decades of his life, Xuân Diệu became an advocate for young writers. By the time Khoa became an adult, he visited the senile poet at his apartment in Hanoi and noticed that Xuân Diệu had become occupied with thoughts of death and old age, yet devoted himself to writing poetry anyway.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.