The Study Of Chen Shidao's Poetry

Chen Shidao is an outstanding poet and an important member of the Yuanyou poetic group in the Northern Song Dynasty. He opposes the political reform that is carried out by Wang Anshi, and refuses to follow the fashion. Because he wants to create a new poetic style that was distinct with the Tang poetic style, he tries his best to select words and deepen meaning of poems. As a result, he achieves a hard and authentic poetic style. This style is a representation of the Song poetry.Comparing Chen Shidao with Jia Dao, a famous poet in the late Tang Dynasty, who has been a Buddhist monk, we can find that the obvious differences between their poems are decided by the different cultures of the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty. Although Chen Shidao and Jia Dao have something in common in their poetic subject and hard creative process, they are distinct essentially in creative attitude and specific skill. Jia Dao's hard creation is backed by his failure in political career as a scholar and his escape in unawareness of both the self and the outside world as a Chan monk, while Chen Shidao's wording refinement displays the lofty spirit of being free from current fashion and the great ambition of being world-famous by poems of the intellectual in the Song Dynasty.Chen Shidao's poems learned from Du Fu's, which is the best paragon considered by Song poets, in such three aspects as style, topic, and wording. He inherits Du Fu's poetry in ways of simulating and reforming. At the same time, he prefers to uncommon literary quotation and jerky wording that bring forth new ideas in the arts. Therefore, his unique style comes into being.This paper will analyze Chen Shidao's poems by diachronic comparison to show his poetic features.