Research On Chen Yan’s Poetics

In the history of Chinese classical poetics,positive change,elegance and vulgarity,and the concept of truth and falsehood have been repeatedly discussed.Chen Yan,who was at the crux of Qing Dynasty poetics and even traditional poetics,also had a profound and subtle discussion of the above issues,and his poetics ideas were basically based on these three pairs of concepts.This does not mean that compared to previous poetics,Chen Yan is not innovative.Objectively speaking,the issues discussed by Chen Yan,even the main viewpoints in his poetics,can be traced to some clues in previous poetics works.However,although Chen Yan inherited the achievements of his predecessors and synthesized the old theories,he also had his own thinking and transcendence.In addition,due to the special historical background of China since the Daoxian period,Chen Yan’s poetics is closely related to the era environment.Modern China was an era of great changes,and society had been in turmoil for a long time.As a scholar who cared about reality,Chen Yan advocated "changing the style and elegance" in poetry,emphasizing that poetry should change with the passage of time.Chen Yan’s "Three Yuan" theory advocates poems that reflect reality,not only refuting the sect of Tang poetry,but also trying to break down the barriers in the dispute between Tang and Song poetry.As a representative poet and major poetry theorist of the Tongguang style,although his "three yuan" theory is patriarchal in Song poetry,Chen Yan is not a stubborn poetry theorist.He also draws on the strengths of other poetic schools,which reflects his broad academic vision and strong practical concern.His theoretical proposition of "combining the poetry of scholars with the poetry of poets" not only refutes the shortcomings of the Zongtang School of Poetry in its emphasis on charm and detachment from reality,but also corrects the bias of the Song School of Poetry in its use of archaic and secluded characters,and attempts to solve the long-standing debate over elegance and popularity.His view,on the surface,is the introduction of the achievements of classics and history into poetics,while on the deep level,it is the embodiment of the sense of cultural crisis and the consciousness of saving the nation from subjugation and striving for survival in the transitional period.Under the historical background of the collision between Chinese and Western cultures and the intersection of ancient and modern poetics,Chen Yan was deeply influenced by the Qing Dynasty’s naive learning and Western scientific empirical thinking.He has special requirements for both landscape painting and lyricism in poetry.His interpretation of the relationship between scholarship and emotion,the relationship between the truth of poetry and the truth of history,reflects the transformation of academic atmosphere,and has the significance of transforming modern poetics into modern scholarship.