The Development Of Diet Poetry From Mid-Tang To Earlier Song Dynasty

As a master said, "food and sex are nature". Food writing should be inherent in Chinese classical poetry, which was aimed at expressing one’s emotion and will. Since mid-Tang Dynasty, secularization of society induced literati creating diet poetry. In addition, enhancements of poetic sensation of poets, as well as their interesting in viewing vulgar as elegance, made poetry get out of utility, realize aesthetic value and peak diet poetry creation in Song Dynasty.The aim of this article was to presenting systematically poems about food (except tea and wine) and diet activities from mid-Tang to earlier Song Dynasty. We tried to reveal how food gradually gets its unique aesthetic value. In other words, we wanted to know how food, as materials of poetry creation, lift to humanistic images, with describing the emotion connotation and expression of diet poetry. The article includes three parts:Part one reviewed the origin of diet poetry before mid-Tang Dynasty, mainly investigating Tao Yuanming and Du Fu’s writings about food. We found that these two literati devoted their unprecedented enthusiasm to diet poetry. Their writings fully demonstrate the personal and social life, with strong flavor of life and humanism. And their attitudes on life made their sincere poems full of life concern. Part two showed clearly the development of diet poetry in mid-late Tang Dynasty. And we tried to investigate changes from how to build food world and how to write food. We found that mid-late Tang’s poets described food as a part of their daily life. The reason why they did this was to express their life-style, or feelings and attitude in life predicament. Even though different people had different life-style, they had the same way to handle food problems, with plain language and delicate emotion. Part three researched the maturation stage of food writing in Song poetry. During Song Dynasty, poets paid more attention to new kinds of food, so that they could make fun of life and recall with emotion. In this stage, diet poetry was full of humor and interesting truth. In detail, diet poetry during Song, not only had abstruse philosophy and elegant literati’s taste, but also included the delicacy of food, the artistry of poetry and the elegance of life.