He was a late comer to the group, which by then had established themselves as a powerful platform for Vietnamese intellectuals, publishing romance novels that entertained the crowd alongside satirical works that lambasted both contemporary society and the French administration.

[13] After Japan entered French Indochina in September 1940, many members of Xuân Diệu's literary group began to focus entirely on politics, including the founder Nhất Linh.

Some of the remaining members, including Khái Hưng, Hoàng Đạo and Nguyễn Gia Trí, were arrested by the French and imprisoned in the faraway Sơn La Prison, marking the beginning of the demise of the group.

When Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi in 1942, most of the writers with whom he once worked had drifted apart or considered joining the anti-colonial resistance led by Ho Chi Minh.

As the First Indochina War had come to an end, and some reforms of the new administration had led to disastrous results, dissenting voices began to rise amongst those who had supported the Việt Minh and were now demanding the freedom to criticize the wrongdoings of the government.

In the end, Xuân Diệu, along with Huy Cận and others, took the side of the government; in a scathing response published in May 1958, he accused the likes of Lê Đạt, Hoàng Cầm and Trần Dần of "capitalistic individualism" and "attempting to poison our atmosphere of prose and poetry, which means that we should wipe them out, that we should cleanse them.

His first works of literary analysis, released in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, explored the cultural significance of classic Vietnamese poets like Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương, the latter of whom was given the sobriquet "the Queen of Nôm poetry"[19] that is still invoked by other writers generations later.

He wrote the book Conversation with Young Poets in 1961 to give some advice both as an experienced writer and as an enthusiast who wished to see Vietnamese poetry flourish in the future.

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.

An often-cited excerpt that reflects these ideas comes from the poem "Yêu" ("Love"): The opening line was inspired by its equivalent in Edmond Haraucourt's "Rondel de l'adieu": "Partir, c'est mourir un peu".

In the poem "Vội vàng" ("In Haste"), which is currently included in Vietnam's high school curriculum, Xuân Diệu also described an obsession with the passage of time[28] and the existential dread that nature "does not prolong the youth of mankind".

These feelings have been attributed by some recent writers to him grappling with his sexual orientation,[29][30] but whatever the case might be, the fears and obsessions are all in accord with the speaker's eventual yearning for intimacy and the decision to rebel against the brevity of life.

[38][39][40] Huy Cận himself spoke of the time he lived with Xuân Diệu in the poem "Ngủ chung" ("Sleeping Together")[41] from his debut collection Lửa thiêng (Sacred Fire, 1940).

[48] Many of his compositions have been set to music, while poems like "Đây mùa thu tới" ("Here Comes Autumn") and "Vội vàng" ("In Haste") have been included in consecutive versions of the official literature curriculum for Vietnamese high school students.

In his own anthology Chân dung và đối thoại (Portraits and Dialogues, 1998), the poet Trần Đăng Khoa, who was now forty years old, attributed this quote to his late mentor: "The writer exists in his works.