A Study Of Chen Yan's Poetics

Chen Yan, was a famous poet, scholar and poem critic during the time of the end of Qing Dynasty and the beginning of Minguo. With abundant contents and unique styles, his poetics developed the useful and discarded the useless of the ancient theories and innovated. His prominent viewpoints, conciliating the theories of Tangsong and communicating poem to poetics, contributed much to summarizing the whole tradition of Chinese poetics. Comprehensively summarizing his poetics and digging up his profound society-care, culture-care and rational spirits, may not only enrich Chinese poetics but also recover the life of the poetics contents which are intentionally left in the literature history.This paper includes six chapter. In the first chapter, we introduce the life experiences and the academic ideas of Chen Yan. About his life experiences, we briefly stress his main experiences in the fields of literature, politics, leagues, writing and editing, to descry the occurring cause of his poetics. Introduces about his academic ideas, mainly describes his achievements in the fields of classicality, historiography and Confucian ethnics, etc.. Then we summarize his academic characteristics, to review the headstream, make out the root, digest and put it into practice. Chen Yan's poetics ideas, such as scholastic poems and verism theory, are closely related to his academic ideas and methods. His life experiences, politics attitude and academic ideas are not only the background of his poetics, but also the profound details melted in.In the second chapter, we treat of a new construction of poetics, Sanyuan Theory, which is the most innovative theory by Chen Yan. He put forward a new ideas of poetics based on summarizing Tang and Song. It contains the poetics ideas about innovation, learning from Song, closing Tang and Song, etc.. Toward the poetics ideas that poems were stiffly divided into Tang and Song, and the argument raising Tang and comparatively lowering Song, Chen Yan put forward the poetics Sanyuan, and argued against the division of Tang and Song. He emphasized that Song Poems' innovation and breakthrough was based on inheriting Tang Poems. So he affirmed the value of Song Poems and rectified the deviation of raising Tang and lowering Song. Paying attention to the real-life, Sanyuan Theory advocates developing the useful and discarding the useless of Feng and Ya, to bring the poems into flourish. So this theory is the projection of the crisis consciousness from the turning times. Advocating Sanyuan, Chen Yan intended to conform the poetics and summarize the argument of Tang and Song. By exceeding the...