Poem Research In The Journey To The West

The 100-chapter version of Journey to the West, completed in the midst of Ming dynasty, is a long literary novel of gods and evils cast in modern vernacular. There are plenty of researchers devoted to the study of this novel. However, most of their studies are around the theme and version of the novel, its author, and main characters, while the very important components--- poetry verses--- of the 100-chapter version handed down for generations had been neglected. This is a great pity in the academic world."Poems in the novel" is an important cultural phenomenon of chinese ancient traditional novel. This paper has a simple and clear introduction of the development of this cultural convention ("Poems in the novel") in the introduction part. Then the writer summarizes current research on the poems in the novel and clarifies the methodology of this paper.Literary creation in a certain period can always reflect the maintream thoughts of the society, so can Journey to the West. The first chapter of this paper explains the influence of the novel completed in the background of Wang Yangming’s mind studies and the combination of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and analyses the philosophical connotation carried in the poems.The second chapter lays emphasis on the poems in the novel. It firstly sketches some academic comments on the poems in this novel with an emphasis on the analysis of classification and characteristic of the poems. The poems in the novel are mainly divided into landscape poem, figure-depicting poem, war poem, philosophical poem and some other poems. Then the write tries to summarize and extract some features of the poems, including figurativeness, narrativity, reality and secularity.So, what is the feature of the poems in Journey to the West? By a comparative study, the third chapter compares the poems in Journey to the West with those in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh and Dream of the Red Chamber, with the hope of making a more objective conclusion.