Soul-stirring Beauty

The Poems of Mystical Excursion(PME),a very special literature pattern, focus on the description of the fairy mirage. The literature source of PME can be traced back to The Songs of the South Zhuangzi and the Qing Dynasty's Celestial Being's Songs with Taoism as its religious soil. In such multicultural situation, PME of the six Dynasties of Han and Wei is characterized by its distinctive poetic style and flexible diversity. Its embryonic stage is the Music Bureau of Han Dynasty, which express the popular psychology pious to the immorals. The poems written by Three Caos (Cao Cao, Cao Pi and Cao Zhi) during the Three Kingdoms symbolize the rising of PME, representing the restoration of the rational-spirited Jianan Dynasty. Ruan Ji and Ji Kang's poems embody the ideas of Zhuang Zi's and the Dark learning, melted together with immoralism and Taoism, which is the further progressing stage of PME. Guo Pu's poems are really the flowers in the garden of PME. With the fusion of immoralism, Taoism, Dark Learning and hermitage, his poems mark the prosperity the PME. However, PME's language begins getting flowery and its contents become empty in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which betokens its downfall. Although the traits of PME of all of the phases vary greatly, it is not difficult to find a consistent theme through the evolutionary process of PME pursuing the permanence and the freedom of life. Meanwhile from all PME of the Six Dynasties, two kind of aesthetic appreciation can be found. They are Mysteriorous beauty and spectacle beauty. And thus PME of the Six Dynasties have exerted long-lasting and far-reaching impacts on the later PME of Tang Dynasty.