Research On Zhang Mingke's Poetic

This thesis explores the poetry of the renowned poet Zhang Mingke in the late Qing Dynasty.Together with the historical background,the poet’s life events,his social life,the features of his poems,realisation of his poetry philosophy,the way he held himself in the world and his works,my study aims to discuss his influence in the poetry field and the characteristics of his poetry through the interlocking relationships aforementioned.Zhang Mingke was a man of humble origins.Wars and his unfulfilling career characterised his early years.The wars not only took away the lives of his relatives and friends,but also literatures.This inspired Zhang Mingke to dedicate himself to preserving both his works and others’ works in his books.Combined with the poetics of Zhejiang School,which was characterised by its emphasis on history,the record keeping function of Zhang Mingke’s poetry was further heightened.Zhang Mingke was able to produce quality works in which the mood matches the setting seamlessly.Because of his emphasis on passing on history in his works,he always put this mission before the artistry of his poems.Research shows that it was for this priority that he had,his archaic style poems were more well-received.It was a shame that these archaic style poems scatter through the eight volumes of Han Song Ge Poems,and are covered up by his more mediocre works.One has to read through all the volume before he could uncover the poet’s keen intention of preserving history through his works.My thesis is divided into seven chapters.Chapter One explores his life events with the aid of literature reviews.This essay briefly depicts Zhang Mingke’s life which serves to help readers understand him better.This chapter focuses on the characters,matching with the official history and local history,to portray people of importance to him,grouping his friends to reveal their relationships with Zhang.Chapter Two is a discussion on how Zhang prioritized incorporating history into his poems over retaining their artistry.From Chapters Three to Five,based on the frequent appearance of poems of certain genres in Han Song Ge Poems,we uncover the fact that most of his friendship poems,especially painting poems,travel poems and poems which were incorporated with Buddhist philosophy were all vehicles of historical records.The three genres of poems were of higher standard in terms of both contents and skills.Thanks to the free style of ancient style poetry offer,in which the number of lines of such poems were more flexible.Such quality satisfied Zhang’s need to record history while retaining artistry of his works.This made his ancient style poetries are better than his modern style poetries.In Chapter Six,the tones used in Zhang’s ancient style poetries are explored.We will see if Zhang put any effort to tones apart from the content and skills shown in his works.Studies show that he always employed continuous using three time of level tone in the last position.Also,he often not uses the same level and oblique tones on the even number words from last sentences to the new sentences as a way to anti-rules of modern style poetries.Though it was not used as explicitly as in Han Yu’s works,it reveals his pursuit of including some characteristics of tones in ancient style poetry.This shows the poet’s greater effort put to his ancient style poetry.Chapter Seven explores Zhang’s pursuit of his poetry based on the conclusion drawn in Chapter Six and his other works.This is to prove his intention in his poetry as proposed in Chapter Two,while trying his best to retain the artistry of his works.On the whole,research find that his poems pursue “Qing” that is the characteristic of Zhejiang school.On one hand,he was able to write poems concisely and elegantly;on the other hand,he failed to produce poems which are concise but “Hou”.His poetry was mostly using the beautiful wording to describe the artistic conception,yet lacking depth,unfortunately.From this study,it can be concluded that Han Song Ge Poems focuses on recording past events,which was in fact quite experimental at that time.The case study reveals that there was a uniqueness in the poetic style among poets in late Qing Dynasty.I hereby humbly offer a perspective to academia: did those poets compiling the collection of poems having an intention as pure as we thought?...