Research For Gu Kuang And His Poesies

Gu Kuang was an important poet at the turn of the flourishing age of Tang Dynasty and the middle Tang Dynasty. Gu Kuang was descended from the Gus in Wu County which was a Confucianism Family. He was the descendants of Gu Yong and Gu Ye-wang, and had a well-known family history and education background. However, in the Sui Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty since Gu Ye-wang, had the Gu Kuangs degraded to the humble landholder from the traditional scholar family. Wu County was Gu Kuang's ancestral home and the systems of prefectures and counties. Gu Kuang's native place was Danyang of Run County, while Haiyan of Su County was his place of habitation. Gu Kuang read and studied all kinds of books in the temples in the mountains near his hometown in his early ages. Gu Kuang successfully passed the imperial examination in the two year of Zhide at his thirty years old then he started to step on official career. After that he had an official tour in southern Yangzi River for many years, and was engaged in salt government affairs. He failed to achieve their ambition in their official careers because of the lower position. From the two year to four year of Dali, Gu Kuang made friends with Liu Hun and Li Mi. A solid friendship among them had a deep affection on Gu Kuang's life. Later he became a member in the regime of Han Huang and took charge of the high-ranking assistant of the highest military officer as a very important role. In the three year of Zhenyuan when Liu Hun and Li Mi held the post of the prime minister in succession, Gu Kuang went into the imperial court and worked as a office as a proofreading official then he was promoted to a historiographer which was the highest post in his life. His political career in Changan was ended after three years when Liu Hun and Li Mi died in succession. Soon after, he was banished to Raozhou as SiHu CanJun. After years, he retired into the Mount Mao and become a Taoist priest formally because of the disillusionment of his revenge. Because of passing the flourishing age of Tang Dynasty to the middle Tang Dynasty, Gu Kuang had deep feeling about the disintegration of social life of Tang Dynasty. As many as intellectuals in that age, his thought showed a complicated trend of value because of the affection by Cultures of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. On the other hand, the regional culture of Wuzhong influenced his thinking too. In a word, he was a craziness of Confucianism, a supernatural companion who came in Taoism and go out of Buddhism, and a versatile gifted scholar in Wuzhong. Contents of poetry of Gu Kuang were full and colorful. The Folk Songs exampled as Thirteen Chapters disclosed the social conflicts existed in that time, in which some extremely sharp and serious social problems such as peasant problems, war problems, corruption problems, and woman and children problems were presented. Its pattern that one or tow words of the first sentence were regarded as a title of this poem in front of which there was a preface was creative. Gu Kuang was good at explaining the music so that there was high artistry in his poems for music appreciation and had gained a great deal of experience for the later. His poems for painting in which permeating the painting experience and aesthetic temperament of himself embodied the aesthetic thought that he laid stress in the first person's emotion-expressing. Furthermore, there contained the skill and aesthetics consciousness of distinctive quality of an artist in his landscapes poems. These poems had pictorial beauty. However, there were more lyrics expressing his individual subjective feelings. The mountain was a very constant image in the poems of Gu Kuang. It was an important starting point on which was helpful to grasping the features of aesthetics of his poems. The whole aesthetic style of Gu Kuang's poems was complicated very much so they contained not only fresh and beautiful poems and high carefree poems with time features, but also that woks with plain and strange features out of his time. Gu Kuang's poesies were collected into 20 volumes in Tang Dynasty but the preface written by Huang Fu-shi can only be found today. Much of his poetry was lost in the Song and Yuan Dynasty while only a part was saved by all sorts of large reference books and collections. Gu Kuang's poesies were collected and perfected in the Ming and Qing Dynasty. There were three systems of edition passed. One edition system with 2 volumes included Poetry of Huayangzhenyi and Gu Kuang's poetry anthology. Another edition system with 3 volumes only included Huayang's Poetry with 1 volume of Gu Fei-xiong's poetry as an appendix. The other circulation system named Poetry of Gubuweng formed from Tangying Tongqian Wuqian by Hu Zhenhen in the Ming Dynasty, later recorded by Poems of All Tang Dynasty, was an important approach to studies today.