Wang Ting-gui Research

Wang Tinggui was an important poet during the transition from the Northern to the Southern Song Dynasty. Being upright and unrelenting in personality, he resigned to live in seclusion. Then he was demoted to Chenzhou because of supporting Hu Quan by writing him poems. After the Jingkang Incident, he cared a great deal about the nation and the people. Cherishing an intense sentiment of patriotism, his poems and essays all achieved a higher success. Wang Tinggui lived in the period when the prosperity of Jiangxi Poetry Group had faded while the Reviving Poetry Group had not risen yet. As a teacher, he exerted certain influence on the thoughts and poetry creations of Yang Wanli, a great poet in the Song Dynasty. In the history of Chinese literature, Wang Tinggui occupied an important position.The present paper is composed of five chapters. Chapter One carries out an introduction of Wang Tinggui's social contact and the analysis of his thoughts and personal character. This part offers many supplements about his friends who are not or not precisely showed in The Chronicle of Wang Tinggui's Life, together with his associations with them. Chapter Two to Three are the study of Wang Tinggui's poems. Guided by his viewpoint on poetry, which was mainly influenced by Du Fu, Han Yu, Ou Yangxiu, Su Dongpo and Huang Tingjian, he pointed out the malpractices and defects emerged in the development and inheritance of Jiangxi Poetry Group's creations, by doing which, he showed a new way to the Reviving Poetry Group. The poems written after his seclusion fall into three time periods: the sanguine and positive poems made during his seclusion in Luxi, the landscape poems to express his feelings during his demotion in Chenzhou, and the ones free of decadent after his resignation and return to his hometown. Most of his poems are substantial in content and vigorous and fluent in style. Chapter Four is the study of Wang Tinggui's prose, which is practical in nature. Integrating the singular and ingenious style of Han Yu's essays and the natural and plain writing of Ou Yangxiu's, his prose formed a distinctive style of vigor, grandness and fluency in strokes .Chapter Five is the study of his ci poems. Inherited the loftiness and broad-mindedness of Su Shi's works, his ci poems, as a whole, present to be refined and energetic and show his generous and exuberant spirit.