Re A Poet

This thesis focuses on the poetic works of Shao Yanxiang produced after his"return"from a 20-year-ban on writing. It provides a historical examination of changes in the perspective of values and lyrical gesture in Shao Yanxiang's post-return works and explores the spiritual world created in those poems. The thesis also offers a preliminary analysis of the specific rhetorical strategies employed in Shao Yanxiang's poems. Drawing on previous research done by other scholars, this thesis further reveals the spiritual and artistic values of Shao Yanxiang's works.The thesis argues that after Shao Yanxiang's return, he went through a transformation from"desiring for the center"to"being content with marginality,"from being preoccupied with"serving the politics"and"speaking for the people"to utilizing poetry to express his own increasingly more individualistic and more complex inner world, which gradually refined and enriched his poetry. Since his"return", Shao Yanxiang has heroically put up with various sufferings and mental scars and tenaciously adhered to his moral ideals. While viewing the world from"the eye of a dying man"has added to his poems a contemplative touch. Shao Yanxiang's skillful use of rhetorical devices such as contextualization, images, and traditional meter provides basic technical support for his leap from emotion to art and reclaim of a poetic identity.Some other issues that have been analyzed in this thesis include whether we can use"sincerity"as a criterion in the evaluation of poetry, what is the relationship between poetry and reality, how to cross the gap between emotion and art, what is the contemporary value of classical poetry, whether we can name Shao Yanxiang's post-return works as"essay-like poems."...