Xue Feng And Poetry

Xue Feng is a special one among all poets in late Tang period, though not a famous literary figure or a fruitful one. His specialty lies in his life experience, theme of his poetry and artistic achievement. The writer of the thesis analyzes Xue Feng's poetry in an attempt to explore the synchronization and synchronization of the poet's individual literary creation and development.Employing the research methods of investigation and comparison, the writer of the thesis makes a detailed research on Xue Feng's life, theme of his poetry and artistic features.The thesis is consisted of five chapters, i.e. introduction, life experience, theme of the poetry, artistic features and conclusion.In the introduction, the writer briefly introduces the literary significance of choosing Xue Feng as the research object as well as the study ever made in the academic field on Xue Feng and his poetry.In the first chapter, Xue Feng's life experience is combed and investigated. In the section of "Painstaking Study during Childhood", it is introduced that Xue Feng, born in a poor family, was a talented and diligent person. He read a lot of books and classics in order to find a life for himself through imperial examination. In the section of "Official Experience", the writer of the thesis focuses on three issues, including Xue Feng's life as the head of Wannian County, consultant of Hezhong and his recommendation as scholar of HongWenGuan. The "Pride and Arrogance, frequent depreciation" section mainly portrays how he lost the protection from his superiors during his first official experience, and together with his pride and arrogance, how he was suppressed and pushed aside in the official circle. The "Discouragement" section chiefly focuses on his miserable life after he offended the power. However, he thought highly of his fame and was greatly concerned with the misery of the poor, which led to his poetic creation of common life.In the second chapter, the theme of Xue Feng's poetry is discussed. From the remained over 90 poems, it is found that his poetic theme varies from traveling and making friends, recommendation, history, meditation on the past, landscape and rurality, among which recommendation takes the most. His poems of recommendation chiefly reveal his desire to show his talents in order to be recommended by the magnate; the poems of traveling mainly describe his responsory with his peers, showing his personality and inner world; his poems of meditation on the past express sigh with emotion of life, grief over the contemporary issues, indicating his gloomy mood and anger during his chilling days; the poems of history demonstrate his longing for the heroes and disappointment to the current political situation; his other poems on ode to objects, frontiers, landscape and rurality, gathering and traveling and so on, though of small quantity, depict the rich picture of late Tang social life with various contents.In the third chapter, the artistic features are developed. XueFeng's literary achievements are mainly demonstrated in lV shi (a poem of eight lines, each containing five or seven characters, with a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme) and ancient poetry. His IV shi are characterized with vigor and width, sharing features of poetry in pro-Tang period. His seven-character lV shi enjoys the vigor of pro-Tang period, which is a rare phenomenon in the overall development of the late Tang literature. But he took too much emphasis on the elegance and concinnity of the poetry. His ancient poems are simple and easy to understand, resembling Bai Juyi's style. However, his aesthetic value was deeply rooted in the forklore, not to chase fame and reputation. Inheriting Bai Juyi's stylistic features such as simple language and intact structure, Xue Feng's ancient poems, though achieving some artistic significance, show little innovation but more plagiary.The part of conclusion mainly discussed the significance of research on XueFeng's poetry. And his poetry can help us to recognize and understand the concrete outline of late Tang poetry in specific times and the specially appointed poet's contribution to the development of literary creation.