Research Of Shen De-qian's Poetic Thoughts

Shen Deqian was a famous poesy critic of Qing dynasty. He summed up the poetics of Confucian whose core is ethics. On the base of stressing poetry's reality , he inherited the style-poetics from "Seven man" and the mystery-poetics from Wang Shizhen . In addition , he absorbed the poetics of Ye Xie and Qian Qianxie too. At last, he established his own poetics which lies on people-oriented indoctrination and takes people's temperament to the first. This poetics is not only the summary of poetry arguments from Song dynasty but also the biggest return of Confucian poetics in the last.Shen Deqian's poetics was formed by three aspects. First of all, the political and economic situation was stabler during the periods of KangXi and QianLong. Emperor KangXi and QianLong both attached great importance to the literature's influence which can give effective assistance to political domination. Emperor KangXi adopted relatively a enligntened cultural policy to alleviate collisions of nation. Writing poems was an idiosyncrasy of emperor QianLong, he and ministers often bestowed poems on each other. The prosperous cultural situation made man of letters feel that their long-buried Confucian ideas could come true.Secondly, the main trends of culture turned to pragmatism after ruin of Ming dynasty. People rethought poetry issue which has been regarded as a cultural issue. Poesy critics began using moral standards to criticize poetry and many ancient poetry questions have been re-interpreted in their hands.Thirdly, former poesy arguments provided for a possible establish his poetics, especially from the beginning of Ming dynasty to the early Qing dynasty there were a lot of debates in poetry. His precursor—Wang Shizhen has already summarized these arguments from a pure poetics angle, so what he could do was paying more attention to the cultural function of poetry. In another word, this is a result of Chinese poetics inherent progress.Poetry's noumenon and the concept of poetry's history constituted Shen Deqian's poetics. Poetry's noumenon was his cognition of poetry essence, and the concept of poetry's history was a show of poetry's noumenon. "Gentle and Kind" and "Distinctive and mystical" are two essential components of his poetry's noumenon. The former requested that poetry must ameliorate man's humanity, conversely, the latter requested that poetry must maintain its own aesthetic characteristics. Apprently, these two components were basically conflictive. So when he put the ethic standards to the first, accordingly poetry's aesthetic characteristics were damaged. This is the universal plight of Confucian poetics too.Corresponding to this, his concept of poetry's history reveals that the contradiction between the ethical values of history and the facts of history. In order to re-establish the cultural spirit of poetry, Shen Deqian reconstructed the history of poetry by using anthologies. Thus, the development of poetry was adhered to the development of cultural spirit. Because of using Confucian poetics to construct the poetry's history, there are a lot of limitations in it. Nevertheless if we want to comprehend Confucian poetics, handle moral and aesthetic criticism, or establish the history of poetry, we can get lots of helps from poetics.