| Leisure, the spiritual home of human beings, is an eternal psychologicalphenomenon. It indicates humans are free from burdensome physical labor, and thathumans are pursuing their own spiritual life and all-round development. From thecultural respective, it is closely related to aesthetic creation. By viewing the pastoralpoetry of High Tang from the perspective of leisure culture, this paper attempts toestablish a relation between the pastoral poetry and humans’ eternal needs for leisure,thus to regard the writing of pastoral poetry as a conscious creation of the literati’sleisure life. Therefore, the cultural position of the High Tang literati’s mind and spiritcan be made clear. By connecting the prospering of pastoral poetry with the thenleisure culture and the literati’s leisure mentality and entertainment needs, this paperreexamines the significance and values of leisure culture and spirit ofself-entertainment in pastoral poetry’s creation and dissemination. On the one hand,by emphasizing the necessary connection between leisure and aesthetic creation, thispaper discovers the relationship between ancient literati’s roaming around mountainsand waters in China and their pursuit of leisure life, and finds out the influence ofleisure on literature creation from the perspective of contemporary leisure aesthetics,in order to provide a brand-new angle for researching pastoral poetry; on the otherhand, by drawing ideological essence from traditional thoughts, literature and arts,this paper tries to reconsider literature leisure and to discover the traditional aestheticspirit embodied in the leisure life of ancient literati, in contrast with the leisure life ofmodern people. |
