Ji Yun, Comment Poetry

Ji Yun,a master of the Pu Study as well as a distinguished scholar ofpoetry in the early Qing Dynasty,focused his academic attentions oncomments on classical poetry as one of his main academic activities.Including the poems of many of the famous poets from the Han Dynastyto the Song Dynasty as well as the examination poems in the TangDynasty and Qing Dynasty,his comments involves the discussions anddescriptions on the following issues,such as"the shift of styles","differences and similarities between different schools",and"the gainsand loses of different poets"in the process of poetry development as wellas deep and delicate discussions on the goals,styles,techniques,etc.ofpoetry.So his comments have significant academic values in the study ofpoetry.Considering his collections and the summaries of The GeneralContents of Si Ku Quan Shu,this dissertation studies Ji's comments onpoetry in a comprehensive way on the basis of investigating dozens of hisworks of poetry comments.The whole dissertation is divided into sixparts.Part one is the Preface in which the general situations of hiscomments on poetry is described and his diligence and depth inappreciating poems is pointed out.On the other hand,with a summary ofthe past related researches in this area,this dissertation describes thevalue of studying his comments and the directions of the study in thispart.Chapter One deals with Ji Yun's ideas on poetry.In this part,Ji'scomments on the goals,styles and techniques of poetry are discussed.Bycombining specific comments,we argue that his idea"poems demonstratethe authors' temperature"is open-minded and objective.His appreciationof"gentleness,moderateness and implicitness"also emphasizes his ideason poets' temperature and the gentleness of contents as well as themoderateness in expressions.Chapter Two is the discussion on Ji's comments on collections ofpoems.Ji's comments on Yu Tai Xin Yong,Collections of Cai Diao andYin Kui Lu Sui are discussed in this chapter.The focus of our discussions are on Ji's argumentation of the following issues:evolution of styles ofpoetry from the Han Dynasty to the Southern and Northern Dynasties,theorigins and problems of the Xi Kun style and Jiang Xi school,the rightpoints and wrong points of Fang Hui's comments on Du Fu's poems andrelationship between emotion and outside environments,the problems ofthe Fengs and Fang Hui's over-emphasis on wording and structures.Thefeatures and values of two editions of Ji's comments on Yu Tai Xin Yongare also important parts in this chapter.Chapter Three deals with Ji's comments on individual collections ofpoems,mainly those of Li Shangyin,Han Wo and Su Shis'.Two editionsof Ji's comments on Li Shangyin's collections of poems are brieflystudied and the differences and similarities are compared simultaneously.The focus of this chapter is on Ji's comments on the value of Li andHan's personality and poems,the often-used techniques,skills used by Suand the demonstration of relationship between emotions and poem in Su'spoems.The acceptance and spread of Su's poems in the Qing Dynasty isbriefly discussed in the last part of this chapter.Chapter Four deals with Ji's comments on the poems required inexaminations in the past time.His comments in Discussions on ExamPoems in the Tang Dynasty,Collections of Gen Chen and Collections ofWo Fa are analyzed in this chapter.In the first part of this chapter,asummary of the examination poems in the early period of the QingDynasty is given,which is used as the background for Ji's comments.Then different features and main contents of the three books are describedand analyzed.In the last part of this chapter,Ji's comments on the writingskills of this kind of poems which include analyzing styles,analyzingtitles,thinking of contents,arranging structures,wording,etc.arediscussed.The last part of this dissertation is the Conclusion in which onesentence is used to summarize the characteristics of Ji's comments onpoetry as a whole and the related reasons behind it are also brieflydiscussed.By combining the above six parts,this dissertation not onlycompletely and thoroughly discusses Ji Yun's works of comments on poems but also explores briefly the evolution and the related reasons ofclassical poetry.