A Study Of Zhao Yi's Poetry

ZhaoYi, a famous historian during the reign of Emperor QianLong and JiaQing in Qing Dynasty, was also an outstanding poet and poetry critic. He enjoyed equal popularity with QianDaXin and WangMingSHeng in historical science. He and YuanMei, JiangSHiQuan were called "three masters of poetry during the reign of Emperor QianLong." But the study on his abundant poetic creation and his original poetic theory are quite lacking. At the foundation of preceding researches, using the method of "comprehending somebody and his time." And comparing him from various perspectives, this thesis studies his poetic theory, his ideological content and the artistic characteristics, with an examination on his life experience, the poetic circles at his time, and the creation of "XingLing" school, so as to evaluate exactly his position and influence in history. Besides, the introduction part reviews the history of the researches of ZhaoYi and his works.The body of this thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter gives a brief accountof ZhaoYi's life experience, giving prominence to the events that have influenced hischaracter, thought and literal creation in order to understand his creation psychology. Thesecond part studies ZhaoYi's circle of friends and his books. ZhaoYi had a large circle offriends when he was alive, which can be divided into four groups: the revered old generations;gifted and elegant scholars; learned old scholars; young generations and his pupils, onerepresentative of each group is discussed here. ZhaoYi has wrote many books during hislifetime, which are discussed briefly in this chapter. The third chapter highlights ZhaoYi'spoetic theory under the social environment of the poetic world and "XingLing" school ofpoetry during the reign of Emperior QianLong and JiaQing, mainly exploring the influenceson ZhaoYi's poetic production of the patterns of the poetic world at that time, pushingforward ZhaoYi's characteristics comparing to YuanMei, the chief command of "XingLing"school, and expounds his poetic theory system from four aspects: theory of history of poetry;theory of poet; theory of poetic creation; theory of poetic forms. The fourth part discussesideological content of ZhaoYi's poems. Generally speaking, ZhaoYi's poems possess not onlythe romance of men of letters, and also the demeanor of historian, which can be saidextensively wide. This thesis will summarize and analyze the ideological content of ZhaoYi'spoems from the following six aspects: paying attention to the actual life, understanding andsympathizing the feelings of people; presenting each other poems and eulogizing virtues andachievement; singing with emotion at the thought of history and mediating on the past;expressing in writing temperament and laying stress on individuals; sing of mountains andrivers and frontier scenery; discussing principles and giving expression to philosophicthought. The fifth chapter expounds artistic characteristics of ZhaoYi's poems. The mainartistic features of ZhaoYi's poems are the pursuit of new ideas in arts and the strong rationalfaculty. This thesis makes an exhaustive study on the artistic characteristics from the aspect of"covering the strong points of the ancient" while having his own features, including all kindsof poetic forms, and pursuing multiple-dimensional new traits; humorous and simplelanguage; scholarly poem that was good at commuting; a variety of artistic styles whilegiving priority to magnificence. The ending part integrates the spreading and acceptance ofZHaoYi 's poem both at home in Qing Dynasty and abroad to judge the position andinfluences of his poems in the history .It is reasonable to say that ZHaoYi, as a master of thecircle of the poetry during the reign of Emperor QianLong and JiaQing, and a representativeof the poem production of scholars, has entered a tremendous influence in the history ofpoetry in Qing Dynasty.