The History Of Rhetoric Theory About His Poetry

Mu Dan is one of the most important poets in modern China. How to understand and evaluate the peculiarities in his works, it is a big question posed to the history of modern poetry.This dissertation tries to illustrate that, Mu Dan’s business of writing, especially his poetic works, opened up "the Third Way" learned from the Auden Generation. The poetry was neither the individual writing escaping from society and reality, nor the pure instruments for political propaganda. Poetic writing should reserve the specific feelings for the times and offer the political and ethnical thoughts in the period of war and revolution.To obtaining that, Mu Dan made a good effort which was different from his predecessors and fellows. The dissertation summarizes Mu Dan’s accomplishments as Historical Rhetoric which has two kinds of meaning. Firstly, Mu Dan preferred to face the experience of his times, keep up the synchrony relationship between poetry and reality. Meanwhile, he promoted poetic thought to the level of historical philosophy, which made his poetry realize the unified of particularity and universality. Secondly, Mu Dan inherited and developed the modern poetic language presented by T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. The art of modern poetry was not only a kind of poetic language, but also a kind of world view for modern poets. By means of the art, history was represented as a comprehensive, complicated and profound process in which poetry held an independent position and played a particular role in society. Historical Rhetoric is distinctive characteristic of Mu Dan’s poetry and the core of proposition of this dissertation.The introduction is a summarization of the dissertation, including introducing the connotation, significance and history of the theme as well as the review of the research history and framework.The first chapter is a retrospective study of the poetic history before Mu Dan. It is also a critical study in perspective of Mu Dan’s Historical Rhetoric. Those theoretical and practical achievements consist of the premise of Mu Dan’s writing and conversational relationship between them.The second chapter analyses the direct and indirect influences of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden on Mu Dan. They together constitute the complete map of worldwide poetry before and after the two world wars. Meanwhile, an overall description for the European poetic trend in1930s is offered as a supplement to understand Mu Dan’s writing.The third chapter discusses Mu Dan’s exploration for the representation of history and experiences in times. Mu Dan transformed and developed the epic tradition, realized the dialectical unity of particularity and universality, partial and whole in the representation of experiences in time and space. All his poetic works sent forth the ray of historical philosophy.The forth chapter analyses the rhetoric characteristic in Mu Dan’s writing through the relationship between prose and poetry as well as the problem of ambiguityThe conclusion is an overall evaluation to the poet and his works.