Abstract: Considering the fact that Li Jinfa’s three major poetry works were written during the years of 1920 and 1924 in Paris and Berlin respectively，instead of studying Li Jinfa’s interactions with his Chinese contemporary poets，it would be more fruitful to examine his poetry in the context of European modernism and discursive streams of modernity. Under the influence of Baudelairean poetics of counterenlightenment and anti-pastoral modernism，there emerged a terrible crisis of économie libidinale born out of the physical exhaustion paralleled with the spiritual lassitude rampant in Li Jinfa’s poetry. The satanic passions against illumination constitute a return to the cave of darkness，sleep，coldness，humidity，and muddiness. This negative aesthetical poetics of modernity means to question and challenge the grand narrative of modernity and the myth of progress.

Key words: Li Jinfa, body narrative, aesthetic modernity, anti-illumination, cave view