| Of all the literary genres, poetry has the closest relationship with linguistic characteristics. Poetic language and form bear conspicuous features. As a key factor of poetic beauty, prosody is composed of two major elements: rhythm (or meter) and rhyme. They play important roles in arousing people's feelings and thoughts.In twentieth century, there has appeared a "Linguistic Turn" in western academic circles. This "Frame Revolution" originates from the famous Swiss Linguist-Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and ushers in a new period of understanding the culture, man, literature and art. However, the reason why Chinese poetics lags behind may be counted for two facts: Firstly a wide spread bias in the common poets and readers allege that the subtlety and profundity of poetry can only be perceived by intuition while a scientific analysis would have made it disintegrated梩o some extent true as far as Chinese poetry is concerned. Secondly, Chinese people are inclined to synthetic rather than analytic thinking mode. They are strong in intuitive perceiving but weak in logical reasoning, which has a cause-and-effect relationship with Chinese poetry. But rigorous analysis and logical induction are important methods in studying poetics.So from the angles of culture and Linguistics, this thesis aims to make a tentative probation into poetic origin, the evolutionary process, rhythm and rhyme of poetry. And a further study is presented on the inner agreement between poetry and its own language and culture.This thesis contains five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion.There are countless examples of the poetic exchangement between different peoples. It has witnessed a long history. For example: Sonnets in English poetry comes from Italy and Japanese haiku has been introduced into English poetry. In 1910s, Chinese modern poets initiated modern poetry movement based on learning from western poetry. Sonnets were also imported into Chinese poetry. So on the basis of the exchangement between English and Chinese poetry, especially in thetwentieth century, the Introduction probes into the necessity and feasibility of a comparative study on Chinese and English prosodies.A good way to understand the nature of a thing is studying its origin. In ancient times, poetry, music and dance were mingled together. They share the same essential characteristic-rhythm. Like drawing, it is one of the earliest art forms. However, poetry has a closer relationship with music. Folk songs are the cradle and resources of poems. In the west, a traditional ballad is essentially a song that tells a story. Lyric refers to the songs accompanied with lyre. And the original odes were songs performed by the chorus in plays or at public Olympia, as well as other athletic tournaments. In Chinese poetry, a lot of poems come directly from folk songs like "Song in wormwood (haoli-xingf and "Bamboo Song (zhuzhi-ci)". Some poetic titles like Gu-chui, Heng-chui, Omg-shang in Yue-fu poetry of Han and Wei dynasties are virtually tune patterns in ancient times. Chapter one talks about the origin and evolutionary process of poetry and how poetry develops from a compound art form into an independent literary genre.Chapter Two is a brief summary about the development of poetic form from a historical dimension and its social and cultural background. Chinese poetry has formed its nature from the very beginning: roughly regular-numbered words in poetic lines, rhyming on even-numbered lines and same rhyme throughout. But due to the linguistic complexities and the influence from poetries in European continental countries. English poetry has experienced all kinds of metrical patterns. The nature of western languages is characterized by their high degree of analytical features and logical functions. They have successfully constructed a world of cognition. Narrative poems are the earliest poetic form. Epics are regarded as an independent literary genre like tragedy. Compared with western languages which are scientific and prosy, Chinese language... |
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