Landscape poetry began in Cao Cao, and the previous poems describing natural scenery could not be regarded as landscape poetry. For example, the description of scenery in The Book of Songs is only for the sake of prosperity and does not have independent aesthetic significance. Poetry in Han Dynasty is only a tool of political education, and there is no specific scene description. In Cao Cao's Journey to Bitter Cold, there are many landscape poems, such as how difficult it is, how bleak the trees are, and how much snow falls. It was not until his Looking at the Sea praised the natural scenery as an independent aesthetic object that the first complete landscape poem appeared. Except for "fortunately, even singing with ambition", the rest are described from the perspective of "watching the sea", and writing about the sea is a manifestation of Cao Cao's self-mind.
China's landscape poems began with Cao Cao, and were passed down by six sons of Jian 'an and two Cao Cao, forming the first link of landscape poems. Accompanying image expression became the first stage of China's landscape image. The poems in Jian 'an period mainly express generous and sad feelings, and the combination of landscape and emotion has an aesthetic tendency of blending scenes. Except Looking at the Sea, none of them are pure landscape poems, and they are attached to such themes as banquets, women's farewell and immortals.
During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, political darkness made seclusion prevail. Scholar-officials often combine the ideal of life with the beautiful scenery of mountains and rivers, and the landscape elements in poems increase. Metaphysics in the Jin and Song Dynasties combined the Confucian "Ming Jiao" with the "Nature" of Laozi and Zhuangzi, and guided the literati to find the meaning and interest of life from the nature of mountains and rivers. Therefore, it is the general trend to embody Hyunri with mountains and rivers. There are elements of mountains and rivers in metaphysical poems, either expressing feelings through scenery or sending Hyunri to mountains and rivers. Metaphysical poetry breeds landscape poetry.
Taikang is not only the beginning of security construction, but also the beginning of literature in the southern dynasties, and it is also the beginning of a gorgeous chapter in the southern dynasties. The landscape of Taikang period is pinned on this gorgeous trend of thought.
After the Eastern Jin Dynasty crossed to the south, the economy in the south of the Yangtze River developed rapidly, and the material life of the gentry was more superior. They live a leisurely life of famous mountains and rivers, playing the piano and singing, and attach importance to aesthetic etiquette. Mountains and rivers, banquets, pastoral areas, immortals, calligraphy and painting are all carriers of this way. Therefore, the natural landscape has become the main aesthetic object in the works. But they despise mountains and rivers, value metaphysics, and enter the exploration of metaphysics from the moment they see mountains and rivers. The infinite vitality displayed by nature often causes them to think about the universe, everything and life.
In the era of Tao Yuanming, pastoral poetry rose, and Tao Yuanming embraced pastoral landscapes and pursued spiritual detachment. The scenery at this time is idyllic.
When Xie Lingyun arrived, China's truly independent landscape poems appeared. As an excellent landscape poet, he completed the transformation from metaphysical poetry to landscape poetry. Although this transformation was not complete, it brought some vitality to the literary world in the early Liu and Song Dynasties. As Zhong Rong said, his landscape poems are "ingenious", "full of books, with no lack of thoughts inside and no relics outside", and he has captured rich landscape themes by traveling for entertainment. The masterpiece Climbing the Pool Upstairs describes the spring scenery seen after a long illness, which sets off a gloomy mood. Among them, "Spring grass grows in a pond, and the willow garden becomes a songbird" has become a famous sentence sung throughout the ages. Other famous landscape quotations, such as "the forest and the valley gather in color, the sunset gathers", "the wild sand bank is clear, the sky is high and the autumn is bright" and "the moon shines with snow, and the wind is strong and weak", all reveal the beauty of nature from different angles, give people beautiful enjoyment, break through the barriers of metaphysical poetry and establish the dominant position of landscape poetry in the literary world. Since Xie Lingyun, landscape poetry has become the first theme of China's poetry, which has had a far-reaching impact on the formation of classical poetry and directly affected the formation of the image pattern of classical poetry.
After Xie Lingyun, through the inheritance of Xie Tiao, the creation of landscape poetry in Tang Dynasty entered the golden age of poetry development. The creation of landscape poems by Zack Zhang and Zhang Jiuling is an indispensable link between Schell and Wang Meng's landscape poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. They created a large number of landscape poems with rich contents and distinctive styles, inherited and developed the expressive art of Schell's landscape poems, formed their own unique style, and made positive contributions to the formation of the ideal style of landscape poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. The pastoral poet headed by Wang Meng represents the aesthetic pursuit of landscape poetry in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. It is poetry that pursues the unity of poetry and painting, pays attention to the unity of things and me, and creates a beautiful artistic conception. For example, Wang Wei's "Living in a Mountain in Autumn" and Meng Haoran's "Climbing the Mountain in Autumn" are all written truthfully with simple pen and ink, plain and natural, creating a peaceful and quiet artistic conception. Wang Meng took a big step forward in landscape poetry. In the late Tang Dynasty, Du Fu no longer described the beautiful and quiet rural scenery, but chose more expressive and magnificent mountains and rivers to express his vicissitudes. Magnificent is the remarkable feature of his landscape poems, such as "Mount Tai is the top of the mountain, magnificent! , lush and green, across Qi and Lu, "Wu in the east and Chu in the south, where you can see the endless drifting of heaven and earth" and "Stark sings five watches, drums beat and shouts, and the Milky Way is over three mountains", which is magnificent and tragic.
The landscape poems in Tang Dynasty opened up a vast realm and made great contributions to the subsequent development.
Three Types of Traditional Landscape Poetry
In the spirit of traditional culture, the relationship between man and nature is harmonious. Plants, animals, mountains, rivers and oceans in nature are all connected with human emotions. They are the ties and symbols for poets to express their feelings. Rhetorically, "Bi Xing" has always been one of the greatest features of China literature. Traditional landscape poetry was born under the nourishment of this cultural spirit.
China poets' discovery of the beauty of natural landscape is often determined by some thoughts. Due to the differences in the authors' world outlook, religious beliefs and natural views, as well as the differences in natural observation, appreciation and aesthetic perspectives, China's traditional landscape poems present three types.
First, people appreciate the beauty of natural scenery based on moral spirit.
This kind of landscape natural poems often rely on natural objects to pin their noble character, childlike feelings and lofty ideals. It is the appreciation of all things in nature by people with moral spirit or harmony between man and nature. In the eyes of these poets, the reason why natural landscape is appreciated by people lies not only in the beauty of natural landscape itself, but mainly in the fact that the spirit contained in natural landscape conforms to people's morality or spirit. Du Fu, Cen Can, Lu You, Xin Qiji, Chen Liang and many other landscape natural poems, as well as Mao Zedong's Niannujiao Kunlun, Qinyuanchun Snow and Qingpingle Liupanshan are all representative works of this landscape natural poem mode. The authors of such poems are often deeply influenced by the spirit of Confucianism's entry into the WTO, and look at nature from a moral point of view or see the natural scenery cleanly.
The second type: the harmony between man and nature based on aesthetic spirit.
In China's ideological tradition, Zhuangzi and Taoism are the most advocating nature. As the highest concept in Taoism, "Tao" can be interpreted as a metaphysical view of the world, can also be implemented in the theory of human nature, and can be experienced in real life. . With the rise of metaphysics in Wei and Jin Dynasties, this ubiquitous "Tao" was concentrated in the natural landscape. Zhuangzi not only inspires people to discover the beauty of nature, but also makes the natural landscape itself the embodiment of Tao. Influenced by Laozi and Zhuangzi's theory and Taoism, poets often observe epiphany from a purely aesthetic point of view when creating landscape poems, and integrate natural landscape with personality themes. Li Bai is an outstanding representative of this kind of landscape poetry.
China's landscape poems have a process of germination, formation and development. In The Book of Songs of the South, natural scenery has gradually become a lyric means, but it has not yet become a direct aesthetic object. During the Jin and Song Dynasties, poets regarded landscape as an independent aesthetic object, and landscape poetry was formally born. Xie Lingyun is the originator of landscape poetry. Xie Tiao came one after another, which played an important role in the development of landscape poetry.
The appearance of Li Bai opened up an unprecedented magnificent pattern of China's landscape poems and reached a superb peak. In Li Bai's eyes, landscape is not only an objective aesthetic object. When we read his poems, we feel that his body and mind have been completely relaxed in the mountains and rivers, and he is free in the mountains and rivers. The scenery understands him, and he understands the scenery. In Li Bai's consciousness, there is a trend of thinking that ignores one thing and ignores me. He saw himself in nature, the infinite space for self-extension and the value and significance of self-existence. From the natural landscape, he pursued and obtained a kind of freedom without any restrictions. Even his strong pursuit of achievement and his undisguised expression of secular wishes and desires are inseparable from his natural personality paradigm. When his wish can't be realized, and he cries out in frustration that "the road is as wide as the blue sky, but there is no way out at present", he can only get spiritual liberation in the majestic Jiang Dahai.
The third kind: people's observation of landscape nature guided by religious spirit.
Like Taoism, Buddhists also have the intention of loving nature, and Buddhism has also had a great influence on landscape poetry. Zhao bian said, "It's a pity that the lakes and mountains are beautiful on earth, and the scenery belongs to monks." The ancients had a poem saying, "There are many famous mountains and monks in the world". These poems all tell a basic fact: Buddhism has a very close relationship with landscape nature.
The maturity of China's landscape poems was in the Liu and Song Dynasties in the 5th century, represented by Xie Lingyun. Influenced by Buddhism, Xie Shi often regards mountains and rivers as the embodiment of Buddha's shadow. Different from Taoist aesthetic view of nature and the integration of personality subject and landscape nature, Buddhism does not take the attitude of integration with nature, but observes silently; Different from the Confucian view of moral nature, Buddhism shows "virtue" to nature, which does not play an ethical role, but only metaphors the vastness of Buddhism. Buddhism experiences a kind of religious happiness in the nature of mountains and rivers.
. Most of the landscape poems of poets, Zen monks and poets deeply influenced by Buddhist thought can be classified into this type.
Xie Lingyun and Landscape Poetry
It is the first important change in the development of poetry in the Southern Dynasties that the landscape poems in the Song and Qi Dynasties replaced the metaphysical poems since the Eastern Jin Dynasty.
During the Jin and Song Dynasties, agriculture in the south of the Yangtze River developed greatly. The material living conditions of gentry landlords are richer than in the past, and more gardens and villas have been built. Under the rich material conditions, the gentry and literati lived a leisurely life of talking about Hyunri and Dengshan River with the southern water environment of Kerry. In their talks, there are often some famous sayings and sayings that give full play to the natural philosophy of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi to praise the mountains and rivers in the south of the Yangtze River. Due to the influence of this atmosphere, some landscape poems began to appear in the popular metaphysical poems at that time as proof or embellishment of metaphysics. Of course, the metaphysical poems in Tao Te Ching, even if dotted with a few rigid landscape poems, can't change that boring face. It was not until the late Eastern Jin Dynasty that several poems, such as Xie Hun's "A Visit to Xi Chi", which concentrated on describing the scenery of mountains and rivers, began to bring a fresh breath to the literati poetry circle shrouded in metaphysics. In the early period of Liu and Song Dynasties, Xie Hun's nephew Xie Lingyun continued to explore the realm of poetry from this direction, created a large number of landscape poems, and made some innovations in art, and finally established the dominant position of landscape poems in the poetic circles of the gentry. As a result, landscape poetry changed from a vassal to a big country, and metaphysical poetry changed from a big country to a vassal. Although this is basically an innovation in theme and art, it is still a step forward in the history of poetry development.
Xie Lingyun (385-433) was born in Chenjun (now Taikang, Henan) and lived in Huiji (now Shaoxing, Zhejiang). He is keen on political power. In the Liu and Song Dynasties, he felt that his privileged position was threatened, his political desires were not satisfied, and he was resentful. Later, he even resigned and returned to Huiji, built villas, dug mountains and lakes, and often led hundreds of servants and students to visit victory everywhere to dispel political dissatisfaction. Most of Xie Lingyun's landscape poems were created after he became the magistrate of Yongjia. In these poems, he described the natural scenery of Yongjia, Huiji and Lipeng Lake with rich and delicate language. Xie Lingyun will never forget his regime in his life, but he has no noble ideals in politics and life. When he was frustrated in politics, he only sought sensory satisfaction outside the voice of dogs and horses, thus covering up his enthusiasm for power. Therefore, although his landscape poems can describe some external scenery, it is difficult to see his inner thoughts and feelings. When thinking is involved in poetry, he always uses some metaphysical Buddhist words to decorate the facade. He has rich knowledge of metaphysical Buddhist scriptures, so it is very easy to modify them. Liu Xie's Wen Xin Diao Long? The emotional article "Shuo Wen" is full of ambition and lofty soil; Although it mainly criticizes the self-righteous literati in Jin Dynasty, it is also applicable to Xie Lingyun. The so-called "landscape is not enough to entertain his feelings, fame and fortune are not enough to solve his worries" just points out the fundamental weakness of his landscape poems. This is also the reason why most of his landscape poems can not be integrated with the scenery and have a complete style. However, because he described the mountains and rivers he witnessed in his poems, it really brought a fresh breath to the poetry circle at that time. In art, he also opened up a new situation in which poetry in the Southern Dynasties advocated lewdness. Generally speaking, Xie Lingyun is the first poet to reverse the metaphysical poetry style and create a landscape poetry school. After him, many landscape poets such as Xie Tiao and He Xun in the Southern Dynasties, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei in the Tang Dynasty appeared one after another. They enriched the garden of poetry with beautiful landscape poems, and Xie Lingyun was a poet who tried his best to carve chapters and sentences. In this respect, he also laid a certain foundation for the new style poetry after Qi Liang.
Landscape poetry problem
The discussion of landscape poetry mainly focuses on three aspects, namely, the class nature of landscape poetry, the emergence and development of landscape poetry and its evaluation.
It is a complex problem to judge the class nature of such works as landscape poems, which involves literary history, literary criticism and other related theories. It can be summarized into three situations: first, it has obvious class nature and tendency; Second, although the class characteristics or class inclination are not so obvious, it can be clearly judged from the work itself after careful analysis; Thirdly, some landscape poems praise or praise the beauty of landscape from beginning to end. The author's views and feelings about society and life are not expressed or revealed, or some poets' subjective feelings are revealed, but they are obscure and tortuous, so it is difficult to judge what kind of thoughts and feelings they belong to, such as Mulan Chai by Wang Wei, Luan Jia Se, Climbing to the Top of Lushan Mountain by Xie Lingyun and Lu Ting by Li Bai.
For the first two cases, people's opinions are basically the same in affirming, judging and explaining their class nature. In the third case, there are two different opinions:
One view is that this kind of landscape poetry simply describes a part of the beauty of nature, or that the author only writes a moment's feeling about a scene, giving readers only the beauty of nature reflected in this part. It is difficult to see its class nature and explain it with the concept of class. We can't interpret the concept of class at will. Everything that doesn't necessarily belong to the category of class, such as people's love for natural landscapes, is distinguished by the concept of class or attributed to the feudal literati class, which is arbitrarily denied or belittled. For example, Xie Lingyun's Lushan Mountain on the Top of Cesium is written in a lonely valley, where the sun and the moon can't be seen all day long, and in winter. If we comment on this poem completely according to our aesthetic taste today, such a scene seems too lifeless. It's better to have a trace of sunshine or human activity, or at least an eagle. But there are such scenes in nature. It seems that the poet didn't write this poem because of his special love or hatred. Since he saw this rare scene, he described it in words. We may have reasons not to appreciate such a poem, but we should not prove that it must show the interest of the literati class, and it is even difficult to see that it must belong to a certain class.
Another view is that this kind of landscape poetry has class nature. Many critics have expounded this view from the perspectives of subject and object of creation and aesthetics. For example, Li Zhengping's The Class Nature of Landscape Painting [4] emphasizes the role of the creative subject. It is pointed out that although the intuitive objects described by landscape poets and painters are unconscious and natural, their descriptions are not rigid, blind and copied, but through a series of thinking activities. The artist's aesthetic feeling of nature is only the basis and starting point of his creative process. When he entered the creative process, the relationship between aesthetic feeling and thinking, consciousness and feelings was broader, deeper and more complicated. Therefore, every landscape painting and every landscape poem is the product of the artist's observation, insight, thinking and understanding of objects, and the result of artistic treatment through selection, generalization and typification-the artist's thinking and consciousness dominate his own creation. The class nature of works is often reflected in the unique way of "humanizing nature"-implication, symbol and metaphor, as well as "emotional intensity" and "picture effect" Therefore, judging its class nature should be related to the nature of the author's aesthetic consciousness, the motivation and intention of creation, and the artistic feelings and some concepts caused by readers' appreciation.
In the article [5], Sun focused on the significance of the relationship between creation and aesthetic subject. It is believed that there is no landscape poem that describes natural scenery purely and objectively. It is not a copy of natural scenery, but a subjective reflection of natural scenery, a combination of scenery and emotion, and a dialectical unity of natural beauty and poets' aesthetics and aesthetic ideals. Even if some works do not directly reveal the author's feelings about society and life, but express his love for nature, in a class society, this love is hierarchical and cannot be super-class. Therefore, there can be no special landscape poems without class.
Xu Huaizhong's article "On the Class Nature of Landscape Poetry and Painting" [6] demonstrates the class nature of such works from two aspects: the complexity and particularity of the unique artistic form of landscape poetry and painting. It is pointed out that the class nature of landscape poetry and painting is more subtle and tortuous than literary works (such as novels, plays, essays, etc.). ) directly describe the production struggle and class struggle in social life. As works of art, landscape poems only express natural scenery objectively and directly, and the author's thoughts and feelings are permeated in the images of natural scenery. This determines the class complexity of landscape poetry and painting. Because of their short form and limited capacity, and because of the objectivity (subject matter) and form (often only a few or dozens of sentences) of the objects described, their class particularity is determined. Although they contain the author's thoughts and feelings, they are not strongly and directly revealed, but are covered up by the images of the scenery, and the depth of expression is limited. What you can see in the works is often only the emotional state, and you can't observe deeper things. Therefore, the class tendency of this kind of works mainly lies in the aesthetic feeling expressed by the artistic image of the works, which is also the main basis for judging its class tendency. Finally, Xu Wen also pointed out that we should not make unrealistic demands on landscape poetry and painting, nor stubbornly seek "politics", impose "implication" and other biases, or use "extension" to find "class nature" in poetry, which can only be a misinterpretation of the class nature of landscape poetry and painting.
Discussing the class nature of landscape poetry will naturally involve the emergence and development of landscape poetry. The clarification of this problem will naturally help to understand the class nature of landscape poetry. In the discussion, many people discussed the basis and conditions of its emergence from the perspective of literary history, but everyone's opinions were different.
Zhu Guangqian emphasized the role of social negative factors in the emergence and development of landscape poems. He believes that the appearance of landscape poems in Jin and Song Dynasties is related to the leftist regime of the Han Dynasty, the social and economic turmoil, the drastic change of social foundation and the prosperity of Buddhism and Taoism. On the one hand, these conditions have influenced the literati class to which the poets belong. They yearn for seclusion, occupy mountains and rivers, establish manors and pay attention to health preservation. Many people hold the idea of "being born", so indulging in mountains and rivers has become an important way for them. In addition, due to the influence of social politics at that time, culture began to turn to decadence, while content was lighter than form and skill was heavier. Writing scenery facilitated those poets who lived in poverty to pursue melody and rhetoric, so a large number of landscape poems were produced. In the article "On the Formation and Development of Landscape Poetry" [7], Cao Daoheng believes that the development of manor economy and the prevalence of Laozi and Zhuangzi's thoughts are the important basis for its emergence. It is pointed out that the prevalence of ancient landscape poems in Wei, Jin and Six Dynasties is mainly due to the intellectuals of the scholar-bureaucrat class yearning for seclusion, and the economic life of the manor makes them very popular to travel around. In addition, it was also closely related to the prevalence of philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi at that time. Because Laozi and Zhuangzi pay attention to quietness and nature, people who like Laozi and Zhuangzi also like mountains and rivers, and express philosophy with the image of mountains and rivers. Lin Geng's "How Landscape Poetry Came into Being" [8]. It is believed that the emergence of landscape poetry is not based on the fact that landscape is far from reality for the sake of landscape, nor is it based on seclusion. It is a natural product of the development of feudal economy to a more mature stage. The economic development and the development of waterway transportation in the Southern Dynasties provided favorable conditions for people to know the natural beauty. It was first embodied in Jiangnan folk songs. The writer used these folk songs for reference, and also lived a life of traveling and experiencing countless famous mountains and rivers, so landscape poems came into being. Song Yuanjia period was a mature period of economic development in the Southern Dynasties, so a large number of landscape poems were produced in this period.
In the article "On the Emergence of Landscape Poetry" [9], Yuan Xingpei made a serious investigation on the social and cultural background of the emergence of landscape poetry, thus disagreeing with the economic prosperity or the development of human aesthetic ability to explain the views of landscape poetry. It is believed that "productive forces cannot directly affect the superstructure" and "literary phenomena cannot be directly explained by the state of productive forces, because the development of social material production and artistic production is unbalanced". He pointed out that the appearance of landscape poems in the early Song Dynasty was determined by the political and class situation since Wei and Jin Dynasties. It came into being on the basis of the prevalence of seclusion under the extremely acute internal contradictions of the ruling class, with the frustrated aristocrats and the middle and lower landlord classes as its class background. In addition, the maturity of palace poetry and the description of natural scenery in folk songs, poems about immortals and poems about seclusion have all made literary preparations for its appearance. There are also "the beautiful scenery in the south of the Yangtze River" and "the personal role of poets such as Xie Lingyun", which all promote the emergence of landscape poems.
Those who disagree with the above view think that although there are social and political reasons for the emergence of landscape poetry, it cannot be narrowly and unilaterally understood as "social unrest" or "manor system", nor can it simply emphasize the influence of seclusion or Zhuang Lao's thought on feudal literati. This question involves the understanding and analysis of the social economy and culture in Jin and Song Dynasties and later, as well as the evaluation of landscape poems and their authors' thoughts and arts in these times, so it is a comparison.
Many articles have talked about the evaluation of landscape poems. Everyone agrees on the artistic evaluation of China's ancient landscape poems, and fully affirms their highly mature artistic skills in describing nature. However, in the discussion, there are different views on its class nature, emergence and development, and different understandings of its ideological content. For example, according to Zhu Guangqian, it is the product of the leisure class, reflecting the attitude and thought of feudal literati to escape from reality. That kind of interest in landscape poetry is "similar to the declining class people who went shopping with thrush cages in those days", and there is nothing desirable in thought. However, Luo Fang believes that as an art, the natural beauty summarized and concentrated in landscape poems can often induce and improve our aesthetic power. Even those works that simply describe the scenery can still have a good influence on enriching our spiritual life and broadening our vision of nature. Taking Wang Wei's poems as an example, we can't think that as long as we appreciate some landscapes written by Wang Wei, we will have a sense of decadence of the declining class, nor can we think that all poems describing landscapes are promoting seclusion. The appreciation of the beauty of natural mountains and rivers cannot be exclusive to a certain class, and the works describing natural mountains and rivers cannot be simply degraded or denied by class division.