| Mei Yaochen is called the “founder of the Song Dynasty poetry”.He has more than 2800 extant poems,which is the largest number of poets in the same age.He has more than a hundred poems on poetry,and its most important contribution and value is mainly reflected in the content of the point of view.These poems on poetry reflect rich poetic ideas,which are of great significance to Mei Yaochen’s poetry theory and the study of the history of poetry criticism in the Song Dynasty.Ouyang Xiu and Mei Yaochen advocated “the innovation of poetry and literature”,which made the new factors of poetry in the early Northern Song Dynasty continue to develop.In this process,the new appearance of “song tune” has gradually breeds,and poetics has shown new development.Many scholars who participated in the movement of “the innovation of poetry and literature”,held the literary concept of emphasizing “prose” instead of “poetry”,but Mei Yaochen was different.He firmly inherited the spirit of irony and the meaning of “poetry and aspiration”.In the Book of Songs,and appreciated the “plain” poetic style of “strange”.He became the representative of the value of poetry in this period and the transformation of the style of poetry in the Xi Kun style.His poetics shows uniqueness and originality.In the poems on poetry,Mei Yaochen launched extensive criticism on the poetry of the former generation,showing the oretical basis of poetics and the origin of potery.He inherited the spirit of the“Book of Songs”,and concerned about social reality and people’s livelihood,which also reflected the trend of thought in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty.He highly praised Ruan Ji and Tao Yuanming’s manners and poetic style,and for the first time in the Song Dynasty,he deeply realized the connotation and value of Tao Yuanming’s insipid poetic style.When commenting on Li Bai and Du Fu,Mei Yaochen expressed his emotional inclination to praise and encourage himself.He thought Du Fu’s poetry was “old”and “proud”.The former is a generalization of Du Fu’s artistic characteristics and artistic features.The latter is rich in connotation,which refers to the imagination,the strange and the rhyme,the momentum,the conception and so on.He praised Han Yu’s achievements in reviving Confucianism and showed his inheritance of Confucian orthodoxy.He envied the communication between Han and Meng,showing his conscious recognition of the formation of Ou Mei School of poetry.He highly appraised the innovativespirit of Han Yu’s poetry in the “yuan he” poetry circle and appreciated the strange style of Han Yu’s poetry.At present,there is a view in academic circles that when Mei Yaochen was in the “Luoyang literature group”,he created some poems of anti Xi Kun style poetry.This article argues that when Mei Yaochen lived in Luoyang,his poems on poetry did not reveal the message of dissatisfaction with the Xi Kun style and the change of poetic style.In the poems on poetry after the first year of the “Jing you”,he explicitly proposed the poetic ideas of reflecting the plain style in poetry and the expression of real life in poetry,reflecting the consciousness of theoretical criticism.After the first year of “Jing you”,the poems on poetry reflects the following poetics thoughts.One is the understanding of the aesthetic category of “clear”,“plain” and “ancient”.Two is the attitude of diligent creation,and he is not satisfied with contempt of the times of poetry.Three,he advocated writing poems as true as painting.He thinks that when selecting objects,there should be no evasion.This explains theoretically the life of poetry and its tendency to ugliness.Therefore,the value of Mei Yaochen’s poems on poetry is mainly embodied in content.They reflect Mei Yaochen’s understanding of poetry criticism,theory and aesthetic category.In this era of people’s emphasis on “prose” and contempt for “poetry” and the less number of other poetics literatures of Mei Yaochen,the analysis of poems on poetry is conducive to studying Mei Yaochen’s Poetics and the history of poetry criticism in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty. |
