Study. Wantangshiren Cao Loose

Cao Song is a poet with a little reputation in the Late-Tang Dynasty. However, his life story and experience seldom exists in the historical records, such as the two Tangshu and the two Five Dynasties history. Till now, the records about Cao Song's three poetry anthologies could only be found in the ancient document Xin Tahngshu -Yiwenzhi. And his life story could be found in the ancient documents, such as Tangshi Ji Shi, Tang Zhi Yan, Tang Caizi Zhuan, Rongzhai Sui Bi, Junzhai Dushu Zhi, and Tang Caizi Zhuan Jiaojian. But there is only some fragmental informations. The academic circles pay rather limited attention to Cao Song, and articles about him are seldom found. Besides three representative personages Du Mu, Li Shangyin and Wen Tingyun, the research about the Late-tang poets are rather rare. In fact, compared with the contemporary poets in that time, Cao Song's poems are not inferior to theirs, such as Fang Gan, Guan Xiu, and Qi Ji. Song's poems still remain the heritage of Jia Dao, and the spirit of Mid-Tang Dynasty's poets, which is indeed precious.There are five sections of this paper from the textual research and the poetics. The first section is textual criticism contents about Cao Song's biography. This is the basic study of Cao Song's poems and his writing style, and this part verified several questions about Cao Song's birth place, the year of his birth and death, the official he had been. The second section is about Cao Song's life story. According to the records which could be obtained today, we can draw a general outline of Cao Song's experience. That includes the places he had visited, the famous things he had done and the official he had got. The third section is the friends Cao Song had contacted, such as the local government officials, the monks and the hermits. Through the research above, try to correct some mistakes and draw a comprehensive conclusion. The fourth section discusses the contents of Cao Song's poems. There are more than 130 Cao Song's poems in the Quan Tang Poems, and they could be divided into three types. The first one is poems of reality, the second one is poems about making friends, and the last one is poems of landscape. And the fifth section studied the writing style of Cao Song's poems. Although the artistic style of his poems is not as high as contemporary poets', his poems reflect strong sense of reality and criticism, and this spiritual value and social significance can't be ignored. To some extent, it reveals the social reality in Late-Tang Dynasty and ambition of the scholars of lower class.