Guo Moruo is one of modern China's most important poets. He was born in 1892 in a beautiful village at the foot of Mount Emei in Sichuan province. He began to write in about 1919, and was one of the founders of the Creation Society, a well-known progressive literary group in the 1920s. Guo Moruo is not only a poet but a story-writer and dramatist; his researches have made an outstanding contribution to the knowledge of ancient Chinese history and the Chinese language; he has also been active in the international peace movement.

His collections of poems include The Goddesses, Starry Sky, The Vase, The Forerunner, Recovery, Battle Cries, The Cicada, Ode to New China and More Poems. The Goddesses, considered by Chinese literary critics to have "inaugurated a new period on poetry," is representative of his early work. "Rebirth of the Goddesses" and "The Nirvana of the Phoenix" were written at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. This was just after the May Fourth Movement in China and Guo Moruo was much influenced by the great event. These poems reflected his passionate opposition as a revolutionary democrat to feudalism. The theme of "Rebirth of the Goddesses" comes from ancient Chinese mythology, as the author explains in a note at the end of the poem. In this work he condemns the tyranny of past rulers, satirizes the warlords of the period after the 1911 Revolution and voices the sufferings of the people under their rule. "The Nirvana of the Feng and Huang" symbolizes the rebirth of China after the May Fourth Movement.