A Study Of Wu Minshu’s Prose And Poetry

Wu Minshu, a great classical prose writer during the reigns of Emperor Daoguangand Emperor Xianfeng, was widely known as one of the pioneers of Hunan classical prosecreation in the late Qing Dynasty. His works has added a brilliant page to the literarycreation of prose and poetry of his time. Wu possessed cheerful characters as well as awide range of friends to whom he had been always kind and gentle; apart from cherishingfriendship, he showed great filial piety to his parents. Wu Minshu’s works, prose or poetry,feature inclusiveness and broad vision. The majority of his achievements center on prosewriting, the language of which gives priority to precision and conciseness, while thecontent of which concerns unearthly matters, inadvertently creating a glorified mood andthus rendering his prose among the finest. Wu proposes originality and opposes imitation;he rejects being limited by any particular standards but advocates absorbing the merits ofeach school. He was a member of Tongcheng School by which he was not constrained interms of making doctrinal innovations and breakthroughs. His articles are characterized bynarratives and landscape and travel sketches, whose style are mainly simple, elegant andcasual. The weaknesses of his articles lie in their lack of reality concerns. Wu Minshu’spoetry is the study of Huang Tingjian, that take from the long and self-contained, elegantand mellow deep sentence meaning; content of poetry to landscape, travel; it has distinctcharacteristics of the times, there are many descriptions of current affairs, reflecting thehardships of the people of. The main disadvantage of Wu Minshu poetry lies in: a largenumber of common, colloquial poems, the poem is too simple, straightforward, so no deepconnotation.