Poetry Can Express Grievances

The poetic idea that poetry can express grievances is initiated from Confucius and deepened and developed by Si Maqian, Han Yu, and Ou Yangxiu, etc, forming the parlances of making a determined effort to write a book, of expressing one's feeling out of indignity, and of writing well-composed poetry after feeling distressed. Putting them in order, we put forward to the idea that grievances are the cultural and psychological reason for easily forming poetry, aiming to pose the parlance that insufficiency is the source of literature. This insufficiency is just in terms of the theory of survival substance, and thus breaks the confusion about the withering of literature. We compare the Chinese theory of poetry and the Western theory of tragedy, finding that although they are both linked with grievances, the Chinese grievances lay stress on the political connotation in which a kind of critical spirit is clearly shown; while the Western grievances possess more catholicity and more transcendent spirits. Seeing the differences through similarity is in order to not set it to right again that the post-modernism advocates the differentiation, but lay more stress on the stubborn opinion that literature will not perish and on the insistence of critical spirits that is the literary tradition of our country.