Research In Xie Lingyun's Mountain-and-water Poetry

Xie Lingyun is the first poet in Chinese history devoted to the creation ofmountain-and-water poems. On basis of Xie's actual achievement and his time and social background, this paper tries to make profound analysis of his poetry.The paper holds that, under the general background of declining and falling of the prominent families such as Xie's in the Song Dynasty, the aspiration in reviving family glory and self social status is the key motivation in Xie's creation of mountain-and-water poems. Influenced by metaphysics and mystery poems, Xie's poem is not directly from them, but a mixed result of Confucianism, Metaphysics and Buddhism. Confucianism made his poems recur in emotion and will expression; Metaphysics made his mind open to the affection of mountains and waters with a mysterious taste and his poems clear and light; Buddhism made his poem vivid and untraceably gorgeous. The end reasoning traditionally regarded as "the remaining of metaphysics" is actually an indispensable part of sentimental expression in Xie's poetry, which absorbed a lot from The Songs of the South, the odes of the Han, Wei and Jin Dynasties, and poems of Cao Zhi and Lu Ji. From them Xie's poetry inherited richly in style of depicting, technology, language handling and motion conveyance, as to present the lasting appeal by playing between "natural" and "ornate" through picturing mountains and waters, in pursuing grief lyricism as the main tune. Through macro and micro views, the poet set his basic frame on an overlapping of time, space and impression.Meanwhile the paper also compares Xie's poetry with those well known pastoral and mountain-and-water poet such as Tao Yuanming, Xie Tiao and Wang Wei, in an exploration of the various influences of different social awareness and degrees of acceptance in Metaphysics and Buddhism in the forming of poetic style.