Poetry had served as the core of traditional Chinese culture. When Hu shi (1891–1962) started the Literary Revolution of 1917, he initially targeted traditional Chinese poetry. New Chinese Poetry, the modern movement born of these attacks on tradition, became mainstream, forcing traditional Chinese poetry into the background. Hu Shi’s collection Attempting Poems (《尝试集》, 1920), the first poem-collection written and published in modern Chinese, was by today’s aesthetic standards rudimentary, yet at the time, it was widely distributed, and its popularity drove the successes of the New Chinese Poetry. This success was largely the result of the shifting social background in the country, with repeated invasion and defeat by foreign powers (a succession kicked off by the Opium War of 1840) pushing many, especially among the intellectual classes, to study and accept the teachings of the West in numerous fields of knowledge. Without the influence of this social shift, there might not have been a New Chinese Poetry; at least, it would not have happened in such a dramatic manner. If something had to happen according to pure poetical reasons, it would have happened in a gradual manner, similar to the many cases throughout the poetical development and growth in the history of China. Yet following Hu Shi’s example, more and more people started to write New Chinese Poems, and most writers of New Chinese Poetry, taking Hu Shi’s ideology as their guide, read widely in Western poetry, imitating those works, and adopting the practices of Western poetics. As a result, New Chinese Poetry came to more closely resemble the works of modern poetry in the West, such as those of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Charles Pierre Baudelaire and others, than anything Chinese. This chapter examines both the social background for this poetic transformation, and the literary tributaries of Western influence that made their way through the great movement of New Chinese poetry.