| During the early Tang period,the composition of music poetry took on a new dimension.Wang Bo,Yang Jiong,Luo Zhaolin and Luo Binwang are known as the ’Four Masters’.They are the most representative poets of the period.Inheriting the literature of Liang and Chen,they were inspired by Shen and Song,breaking the narrow confines of palace poetry,broadening the subject matter of their poetry,and innovating and developing the form and content of their poetry.Their music poems are magnificent and powerfully moving.The poetry of the Four Masters of the Early Tang Dynasty marked a shift in poetic style from the lyrical to the majestic.This essay is divided into three chapters.The first chapter provides an overview of the early Tang Yue-fu poetry scene,as well as the lives of the Four Masters and the overall composition of Yue-fu poetry and analyses the absence of Yang Jiong’s Yue-fu poems from the Collection of Yue-fu Poems,arguing that his poems were mostly scattered in the course of later transmission.The second chapter examines the origins,themes and genres of the four poets,discussing their relationship with the circumstances of the times,and revealing the unique artistic charm of the four poets,who opposed the pretentious Qi and Liang style of poetry and advocated writing with substance,robustness and freshness,in an attempt to restore the essence of the poems to their original character of ’feeling in sorrow and music,and expressing themselves in the light of events’.The third chapter,through an examination of the four great musicians,is a series of poems that have been written by the poets.The third chapter,through a study of the poetic theories of the Four Masters’ Yue-fu,shows how the Four Masters inherited and changed the poetic style of the previous generation of Yue-fu,while also reflecting the spiritual outlook of the literati community in the socio-historical context of the Tang dynasty.The study shows that the composition of the Four Masters’ Yue-fu was very influential at the time,and played an important role in the development of later Le Fu literature.The poems cover a wide range of themes,such as the conquest of the frontier and the perception of life,which were closely related to the social background and cultural environment of the time. |
