Tang Dynasty Poet Epitaphs Dynasties

In Tang dynasty,the epitaph had become very mature as a style of writing.First,as a eulogy,it should hold respects for the dead people, so it inevitably keeps some shameful things unsaid,sometimes it even flatters the dead person.Meanwhile,as a biography usually written by someone who knows the dead person very much,it could be very reliable and detailed.Many scholars have already made good use of the epitaphs in the researches on Tang poets.They have supplemented a poet's list of works, added and corrected his experience,determined the writing-time of the works,determined who is the author of the poem,commented on a poet's writing style,studied a poet's cultural view,and so on.On the basis of these researches,I am doing a portion of Tang poets' epitaphs,especially focused on the unique writing style of the epitaph and these poets' experience and family.The paper has three chapters. Chapter one,these poets' epitaphs have been reserved in the tradition literature.Chapter two,these poets' epitaphs have been unearthed. Chapter three,both the poet's and his relatives'epitaphs can be found.In the first two chapters,I respectively divide the poets into two kinds.One kind of poets has his own biography in the New and Old Tang Histories,in this case,we can compare the two kinds of biographies and study the epitaph's writing style.Another kind doesn't have biography, so in this case,we mainly use the epitaph to write his biography.The last chapter has some individual studies on poets who have a little more relatives'epitaphs.