The Prosperity Of The Tang Music, Poetry, And Its Causes

Compared with idyllic, frontier, knight poetry, melodic poetry is also an important category of Tang poetry. Its diverse cultural connotations and aesthetic beauty is irreplaceable. The sheer quantity and the overall standard of melodic poetry in the Tang Dynasty render that kind of poetic creation a place in the literary history. According to available statistics, poems devoted to music and dancing number over 1000 pieces, poems describing the musical instrument is about 300 pieces, and poems picturing the scene of enjoying music under the moonlight is 400 pieces or more in the book Quan Tang Shi. Amid the vast compass of Tang melodic poetry, poems composed during the Mid-Tang period is perhaps the most outstanding. The musical development reached its peak in the Tang dynasty, as shown in the prosperity and popularity of court banquet music and music styles adopted from the western minority groups. During the Mid-Tang period, court banquet music style gradually assimilated by commoners and the ethnic musical style generated great interest among people. Easy access to music created a great opportunity for the development of melodic poetry. What's more, the tendency to seek sensuous and luxurious living was so popular that everyone seemed to be able to interpret music in one way all other, which provided a fertile ground for the melodic poetry to bloom.In order to illuminate the prevailing prosperity of melodic poetry and its causes, this thesis is structured as follow:An overall survey of achievements in poetry, calligraphy, painting, musical during Tang Dynasty is present in Chapter I.Chapter II proceeds with a definition of "melodic poetry", then moves on to compile statistics in terms of poets and poetry of this category. Finally, the overall development and characteristic of melodic poetry in four stages of Tang dynasty will be introduced respectively.Chapters III digs further into the cultural connotations and classifications of melodic poetry in Mid-Tang period.Chapter IV tries to illuminate those causes that contributed to the prevailing prosperity of melodic poetry on basis of both objective premises and subjective quality in Mid-Tang period.From above analysis, this thesis reaches the conclusion that melodic poetry composition reached its peak in Mid-Tang period.