Research On CaiXiang's Poems

Cai Xiang,the famous politician, calligrapher, agronomist of Northern Song Dynasty, was also a kind-hearted poet, always concerning about people`s living condition, who had written totally 420 poems including 103 ancient-style poems and 320 new-style poems. In recent years, the discussions were only concerning about one side of the writer or his works, and lacking a comprehensive exposition. Therefore, in this paper the author, associating with the social and cultural background of Northern Song Dynasty as well as the poet's life experiences,excursion and personal temperament, makes a comprehensive, systematic study of the artistic features and thoughts of Cai Xiang`s poetry.This paper has been divided into three parts. The first part mainly introduces Cai Xiang`s life experiences and excursion. Borned in a peasantry family, the poet was quite familiar with country`s life style and had a deep feeling for farmer`s happiness and agony. The family, educational experiences as well as the intercommunication with his official colleagues had a great impact on Cai Xiang`s thought and character.The second part are chiefly concerning about the main content of Cai Xiang`s poetry. Taking a panoramic view of "The Complete Works of Cai Xiang," I think that his poetry can be divided into five categories, including the toast exchanging poetry, the political reality poetry and pondering poetry, Old Wing epic, Wing-sie poetry. Those poems, in a various way, not only reflect the poet`s noble character of caring for the country and the people, advocating justice, love-filling relationship in family and friends, respecting to Rhenish talents and so on, but also express his exalted taste of adoring the nature, hometown, as well as life. And the first section is chiefly discussing about Cai Xiang`s poetics tendency, specifically, starting with extracting his comments on literature and then analysing relationship of his poetic style and the three-main-style in the early Northern Song Dynasty, and basing on these analysis we could explore Cai Xiang`s poetic tendencies. The third part analyses the artistic features of Cai Xiang`s poetry and it has been divided into three sections. The second section pays much attention to his artistic features of ancient style poetry and so as the new-style poetry in the third section.