The Research And Expounding Of Xu Tang's Life And His Poetry

Xu Tang was an important and accomplished poet in the late Tang Dynasty. His poem "Cross the Dongting Lake" spread far and wide, making him known as "Xu Dongting" and ranked among "the ten phylosophers in Xiantong". However, about such a poet and his life story, few historical records have been found. Textual research and data collection done by people today about him are fragmentary and scattered. The ancient people only showed appreciation of and made comments on some of Xu's poetic works and people have not had a thorough and systematic study of the ideological content and artistic features of his poems. Therefore in this paper Xu Tang has been chosen as the subject of a systematic study, which can not only fill the gap in the research of the works by the poets in the Tang Dynasty but also have some propellant and remedial effect on the study of the development of the poems written in the late Tang Dynasty, which is still a vulnerable research sphere.This paper probes into Xu Tang's life story and poetic works from three aspects: firstly the textual research of his taking imperial examinations repeatly without success and his later frustrate official career; secondly, the expounding of his image as a poor. woeful and lonely poet who was not willing to sink into degradation and thirdly the expounding of how he made painstaking efforts in perfecting his poetic art with outstanding achievements. The textual research aims at clarifying the poet's main life story and experience with authentic historical data, thus laying a necessary foundation for the expounding in the following part of this article. The purpose of expounding is to make a deep going theoretical exposition of the image of the poet in his poeticworks as well as his artistic, merits and therefore reach a conclusion about Xu Tang's position and role in the course of the development of the poems in the late Tang Dynasty...