A Comparative Study Of Plant Images In Qu Yuan’s And William Wordsworth’s Poetry

Image is a very important literary category in the theory of poetics and poetry creation. For thousands of years, the cultural heritage of the Chinese nation has formed image theory in classical poetry and also produced an indelible impact on western poetry. Either British and American imagists or symbolists in France were influenced by the image theory of ancient China. Naturally, cultural differences between East and West determine the coexistence of two image theories. After Western literature entered into the Romantic period, a lot of representative romantic writers, especially the British Romantic poets, made full use of the plant elements in their poetry to express their emotional sustenance. Compared with images embodied in these plant elements, the plant images in Qu Yuan’s poetry have both similarities as well as differences. Based on this, the author would like to implement a comparative study of plant image by comparing the poetry of Chinese poet Qu Yuan and the poetry of Wordsworth, the most representative poet of the British Romantic period.Using plant images is one of the most obvious characteristics of poetry during both the ancient Chinese period and the English romantic period. Taking Qu Yuan’s poetry and Wordsworth’s poetry as the corpus, this study discusses the plant images in Chinese and Western poetry from the perspective of comparative literature. This paper focuses on the contexts and combines with the poets’ lives and their living environments to explore the similarities and dissimilarities of the two poets’ poetry. Furthermore, the using causes of plant images at different times in different countries were analyzed. The author found that even if the Chinese and western poets selected different plants in their poetry, the plant images may present the same emotions in their poetry, and these kinds of plant images were the manifestation of romantic poetry.There are six parts in this thesis. According to the viewing of Chinese poets and western poets, the definitions of image were introduced in the first part of this thesis. And the importance of plants in Qu Yuan’s poetry was expressed, and a lot of plants in the poetry written by Wordsworth were listed. The former researches of plant images in poetry at the times of Qu Yuan and William Wordsworth were reviewed in the second part. The culture background about Qu Yuan and the applications of plant images in his poetry were mainly introduced in the third part. Similar as the third part, an introduction of William Wordsworth from the same aspects was illustrated in the fourth part. The similarities and differences of plant images between the poetry of Qu Yuan and Wordsworth were explored in the fifth part. Finally, the last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis which summarized the conclusion of this research and pointed out the limitations.