Wen Yiduo was born Wén Jiāhuá (聞家驊) on 24 November 1899 in what is now Xishui County in Hubei Province.

A small memorial to him, including a wall portrait painted from a famous picture of him smoking his pipe is found in a walkway by his former home (the site is now part of an elementary school) in the Green Lake area of Kunming.

He modeled his poetry on that of the English poets John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning, and tried to "recapture the symbolism and ethos of premodern Chinese society".

[3] The poems in his second collection, Dead Water (Sǐshuǐ 死水), have "a haunting musicality", and deal with the "heartrendingly heavy" subject of exposing social injustice and corruption.

[4] Wen was credited by David Hawkes as the initiator of the cult of Qu Yuan as "China's first patriotic poet",[5] writing that, "although Qu Yuan did not write about the life of the people or voice their sufferings, he may truthfully be said to have acted as the leader of a people's revolution and to have struck a blow to avenge them.