Zongyuan Poetry

Liu Zongyuan was a well-known thinker and writer in Tang Dynasty. With the thinker's coldness and the writer's enthusiasm ,there are two totally opposite styles in his works. One is cold and glittering with rationality ,and the other is depressive, resentful and oppressive.Some of Liu Zongyuan's poems are plain, implicative like Tao Yuanming's, some are pure and refined ,and some are direct when expressing emotions. There is a similar artistic feature among different styles. His poems presented the new landscape state .And they are melancholy, pride and plaintive implicitly or obviously. Through a comprehensive study on Liu's poems written in Yongzhou and Liuzhou, we can find his landscape poems of these two periods change from depressive to desperate in feeling, from clear to grotesque in image, from five -character poetry to seven -character, Classic Style Poetry to Modern Style Poetry in form, from simple to pure and cold in style. And all these constitute the evolution trace of Liu's landscape poems.Liu Zongyuan divided the concept of "wen" into "writing" and "bi xing" in a broad sense. About the latter, he pointed out the magnificence brought purity and eloquence, and poems of this kind should be allegorical .And his resentful poetic opinion reveals the lyric feature of poetry.Liu Zongyuan and Qu Yuan, these two poets have very similar political ideals and experiences. Because of the deep influence, Liu learned the core of Qu Yuan' spirit. But in the acceptance history of Liu Zongyuan's poems, the most famous comment was made by Su Shi, who put forward the theory of withered and quietly elegant in the field of poetry.In Liu Zongyuan's poetic structure, there is not only the return to the traditional poetic school of purity , but also the innovation combined with elements of "Yuanhe Poetic Incident". Compared with Wei Yingwu's regression, Liu Zongyuan directed the new tendency .Of course, the mainstream of Liu's poems are regressive in the poetic style of Yuanhe period. His poems differ from Han Yu and Meng Jiao's grotesque style and YuanZhen and Bai Juyi's simple style .It is the dual uniqueness that establishes Liu Zongyuan's position in the poetic history of Tang Dynasty, and makes a tremendous impact on the development of poetry.