On Li Dongyang’s Style-and-Tune Poetics

In the literary circles of early Ming Dynasty, Chaling School, founded by LiDongyang, adopted the theory of style-and-tune to give comments on poetries, whichhad a great influence on the poetics tendency thereafter. Li Dongyang combined“style” and “tune”, scattered and mostly listed separately in previous poetics, into astable phrase “style-and-tune” and formed a unique style-and-tune poetics, whichaffected Seven Master School and Classicist School on literary creation, theoreticalformation and critical practice profoundly.Based on intensive reading of works, the “style-and-tune” theory of Li Dongyangmade use of “ears” and “eyes” to identify “style-and-tune” and “era’s style-and-tune”of poetry and articles and then further distinguished the thoughts and art styles of allkinds of literary forms. With explicit sense of identifying the literary form,“style-and-tune” theory offered a available way for people to grasp estheticscharacteristics of classical poetry much more finely and effectively.As for the studies of Li Dongyang’s poetics, the research results are fairly richwhile single article discussions are much more than comprehensive studies. So, thispaper will try to study his poetics value comprehensively, which will probe thesignificance of his poetics from the following aspects.The exordium will introduce Li Dongyang’s life and works and then show thecurrent research status, existing problems and the significance of this subject.Chapter I aims to master the politics and cultures as well as Literary Trends inearly Ming Dynasty, which will offer the background for the research of LiDongyang’ poetics. As the rulers in early Ming Dynasty implemented political andcultural tyranny and strongly advocated Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, the thoughtsof scholars were heavily controlled, free literature atmosphere formed in late YuanDynasty was forced to end abruptly and the literary trends was also forced to changeits ways. So, with the hope of changing the dead statue of poetry circle, all kinds ofliterati groups and poetics schools choosed to restore to ancient forms of writingpoetries and they started to esteem the poetries of Hanwei and Tang Dynasty and then changed to imitate the poetries of the flourishing period of Tang Dynasty and oust thepoetries of Song Dynasty. During the period of restoring ancient forms, style-and-tunepoetics was put forward correspondingly and Li Dongyang was the initiator.Chapter II will view Li Dongyang’s style-and-tune poetics from the aspect ofrestoring ancient forms and variation. The general tendency of his restoring ancientforms was to learn the poetries of Hanwei and the flourishing period of Tang Dynasty,but at the same time he also paid some attentions to the excellent poetries of SongDynasty. However, he emphasized that while studying and learning the ancient works,we should read the poems aloud repeatedly to understand and comprehend themthoroughly, not just imitating them word by word as well as sentence by sentence. Inthis way, he believed, we could receive a lot and get more possibilities to express ourideas freely.Chapter III will further illustrate that how Li Dongyang uses “ears” and “eyes” toexplain “style-and-tune” from the aspect of identifying the literary form and revealinghis thoughts. He believed that what “style” should include would be genre, style,metrical pattern, writing strength and even the connotation of poem and what “tune”should include would be rhythm, cadence and tone. Compared with “style”, LiDongyang obviously paid more attention to “tone”, namely, the musical characteristicof poetry. His “style-and-tune” theory had represented the lyricism of feeling to sound,the sense of identifying the literary form with sound and the view of articulating thepoetic technique through sound.For further recognizing the significance of Li Dongyang’“style-and-tune” theory,the last chapter will bring him into the field of the history of Chinese poetics to showhis impact on Former Seven Master School and Shendeqian. Former Seven MasterSchool, especially He Jingming, in the field of restoring ancient forms, was excatly inline with the “style-and-tune” theory of Li Dongyang due to his idea of restoringancient forms to variation. What’s more, the ways he learned the poetries of ancientswere also based on grasping the style-and-tune of ancients’ poetries. The“style-and-tune” theory of Shendeqian not only absorbed aesthetics characteristicsfrom Ming Dynasty, but also mixed up with traditional ethical and moral factors. His “style-and-tune” theory also appeared to follow the trend of restoring ancient forms tovariation.