Examine The Cultural Geography Of The Baiyangdian Poems

From the perspective of cultural geography, this paper discusses the Baiyang Lake Poems, which are taken as the first signs of Chinese Misty Poems. The author of this paper claims that it is not an incident that the style of Baiyangdian Lake Poems started at the region of Baiyang Lake. It is a result of the influence from the special geography and other related factors in the region.The term of "Baiyang Lake" implies that the roots of greenness in the countryside and the mystical beauty of the lake matched with these Baiyang poets' understanding of the meaning of life and expectation of the future. The wet land around the lake shares the beauty that poetry aims for aesthetically. The beautiful background of Baiyang Lake functioned as a never exhausted spring and became the resource for the Baiyang poets to produce their poetical imaginations.The characteristics of these poets are the combination of the individual heroism, starting with Jing Ke, an ancient hero in the states of Yan-Zhao and the soft style of Lotus Pond Writers, presented by Sun Li. Baiyang Lake poems are full of the sentences of rebellious and questioning. This distinguishes the characteristics of these poems from those followed the main stream topic of community during the historical period.Baiyang Lake poets are the group of young people who moved away from the political and economical center and got into the remote countryside. They moved from the region which belonged to the main stream cultural groups and got into the less important countryside. Choosing to write poems in the Baiyang Lake style was their choice, but a passive choice. Their energy of writing came from the deep feelings of being exiled, wandering around without destine, and losing home. The roots of their poems were in Beijing while the leaves bloomed in Baiyang Lake. Their open minds and isolated living conditions, in fact, offered them an advantage of writing poems.The proper distance between Beijing and Baiyan Lake is similar to that between the frontline and home base, or old mansion and back yard. The thousand mile space allows them to be connected sometime, and disconnected other time with the main stream. This kind of relation creates a mutual stimulation when they wrote.The above five factors are the reasons which explain why the poets were from Baiyang Lake while most of other educated youth villages created novelists instead. Thirty years ago, during the special historical period, a group of young men left their home, carried their simple luggage, came to the Baiyang Lake, and then walked into the history of Chinese Poetry.