The Comparative Study On Bai Juyi's And Li Shangyin's Peotry Of Sentimentalism

As the two famous ones in the circles of poets in the Middle and Late Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi and Li Shangyin were sentimental and passionate in personality. There was a sense of mawkishness in their poems, which had much in common with the theme such as changeable fate, emotional setbacks, and ups and downs in officialdom. In particular, the love themes in their poems were moving and sorrowful, due to the projection of their emotional experience into their works. However, the significant differences existed in the way of their expressions, the content of their description, the effect of resonance and the approach of releasing mawkishness. Especially their idiosyncrasy of mawkishness was quite distinguished, owing to their growth environment and the different situation they met. Their differences reflected the poets'similar mawkishness because of declining national strength and finding no way to serve the country, also represented the new development of poetry's artistic expression because of the change of their fortune under the social background of the Middle and Late Tang Dynasty. Meanwhile, the literal tendency and the artistic genre of mawkishness that Bai Juyi and Li Shangyin presented had an important impetus to finalization of Ci poetry characteristic of "Subtleness and sentiment" later ages.