Read The Mountains, Shape The Spirit

Zheng Zhen, one of the most outstanding poets, was born in a remote county of Guizhou Province in the southwest of China in the late of Qing Dynasty during which the country was on the wane under the rule between the Daoguang and Xianfeng Emperor. He was proficient in classics philology and poetry, painting and calligraphy, ect; and was known as the Giant Confucianist of the Southwest; also he was ranked in The History of Qing Dynasty Eras, and was especially praised as the CROWN OF QING'S POEM for his distinguished brilliance in this area. His poems describe not only the poverty, misery and customs of common people in Guizhou, but also the great natural beauty of Guizhou. He experienced things that most people had never experienced and wrote things that others had never wrote. With his splendid writings he showed us the scenes and specially its extraodinary nature of Guizhou living. These poems showed the great sceneries of Guizhou in his time with plenty of imagination and freshness, and thus his works about Guizhou sceneries could be counted as wondrous works of Chinese poems. His poems played an important role on reversing the weak and low style of SOUL POETY and exploring a new style. Therefore his poems are worthy of well studying.In the poems of Zheng Zhen, some images were shown in high rates, for instance, the hills and mountains. He had written lots of hills and mountains in his poems which showing quite a unique style and abundant contents. This essay aims at studying the mountain image in Zheng Zhen's poems along with concrete poems and discussing this image from different points of view. We will start with the images of mountains, reserching how the poet corresponded its inner abstracts and outer objects. With these analyses we will research the style and character of the poet's works, and the origin from which the style formed in four parts.First part, which starts with the subjective records about the chorography, the poet's personal experiences, compares the mountains and rivers in Zheng zhen's poems to the ones that is recorded in the chorography, aiming to reappear Gui Zhou's wondrous scenery showed by Zhengzhen.Second part, which is focusing on the features of the mountains, the cultural contents of his poems and the character shown in the mountain image, studys and appreciates Zhengzhen's poems and also the contents within his images.Third part, which is combining with his personal experiences, analyses the diversity of his poems in different periods, and catch his unique style and its reason by studying his lifetime.Fourth part, which is taking mountain poems as example, studys and analyses Zhengzhen's learning and inheriting style from that of Hanyu in three aspects in detail. The style of Zhengzhen's poems is on one hand easy to understanding, on the other hand full of deeply significance; and it's not just imitating others, but of his own style.