The Gradual Progress Of The Life-viewpoints In Early Tang And Its Effect On The Landscape-Pastoral Poetry

This thesis attempts to make a probe into the artistic development course of the landscape-pastoral poetry in early Tang dynasty (618-907) through the analysis of the alternate changes of the viewpoints of life of the men of letters, as an influence, in the various historical periods form the early to the prosperous stage of Tang dynasty. Wang Ji, a poet who had lived through the historical period form the last years of Sui Dynasty (581-618) to the early years of Tang dynasty, held a viewpoint of life with a twofold color of both the beginning and end of a century. The chaos caused by wars during the change of the dynasties, which he had personally experienced, haunted him with a boundless and profound consciousness of death, the dominance of which resulted in Wang's natural philosophical viewpoint of life of maintaining life and security. But then, the spirit of the Chinese traditional culture and the political situation in the early Tang period led him to an ethical viewpoint of life of self-fulfilling and achieving accomplishment. The severe conflict between the two points brought Wang into an existence of anxiety and untrue self-identity. The artistic characteristics of his landscape-pastoral poems, because of his self-contradictory viewpoint of life value, assumed distinct features of the time, of which initial integration of landscape and pastoral poems appeared, the artistic conception of landscape began to make its appearance, and the deviation of the elegant and simple style of poems from the royal court style advocated the artistic characteristics prevailing in the prosperous stage of Tang dynasty. The breakthrough in his artistic creation laid down the position of his poems as a connecting link between the preceding and the following poetry writing. The establishment of the imperial examination system during the reigns of Wu Zetian (690-705) and Zhongzong (705-707) in the middle phase of Tang dynasty triggered and promoted the pursuit of the men of letters for individual life value, while the conflict between individual life value and the puzzledom in that political situation resulted in their vehement life emotion of a wandering and unstable life. The life emotion of the work was represented by three aspects: the spring up of the universe view ; the lonely sentimentalism of Chen Zi'ang; the lamentation during the banished period of Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen. The landscape-pastoral poetry in that period, because of the particular life emotion, was characterized with the prosperity of the landscape poems as in the style of ig Xie?(Xie Lingyun) and the decline of the pastoral poems, and the gradual extension of the artistic conception of landscape. The conception of landscape was represented by the aspects: the aesthetic view changed from royal court to wilderness; the aesthetic emotion changed from delicate to virile; the aesthetic performance changed from the separate of feeling and setting to the blend of the two parts. Of the poetry writing during the period from Shenlong to Kaiyuan (705-713) in Tang dynasty, the landscape-pastoral style of poems reached its peak, which was represented by two tendencies: the Jingluo (Xi'an-Luoyang) style and Wuyue style of poetry writing which were mainly devoted to the writing of garden-cottage life in the capital of Xi'an and the writing of the landscape in Wu and Yue and whose poems were largely intended to express a kind of peace and happiness of the harmony between body and mind; the other school of landscape poets represented...