A Study On Madai And His Poetry

Among all the literati in the late Tang Dynasty, Madai, with a small number of poems now in existence, have made great achievement in literary creation. As most coetaneous literati, Madai also felt the decline atmosphere of an overripe time, so in many way, his composing followed after the change of the era and express the typical desolate and bleak vision of the late Tang Dynasty. Due to his own experience, Madai deviated from the main current in esthetic orientation, which resulted in the special features of his poems. Although Madai's poems have attracted great attention and got high praise all through the ages, there was little material about his life and the research about his poems is rare, which is of no service for us to get a thorough understanding of the poems in the late Tang Dynasty.This thesis makes an overall inquiry into Madai's life and his literary achievement, with the specific culturel background of the late Tang Dynasty taken into account. It is divided into four chapters.Chapter one makes a rough research about the dates of Madai (his birth and death) and his native place by analyzing the historical materials and the research done by former researchers.Chapter two researches textually into Madai's whole life and the composing time of his poems on the bases of historical materials and the messages disclosed by his poems, so that we may obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the poet and his literary composing.Chapter three analyzes the artistic characteristics and features of Madai's poems and is divided into three sections. Section one discusses about the features of the poems of Madai. Compared with other coetaneous poets such as Jiadao and Yaohe , Madai also composed poems with the following two main themes as invoking an aspect of nature and responding to other's poems. Although both of the two kinds of poems express the typical desolate and bleak vision of the late Tang Dynasty, with reference to wording,phrasing and organizing , with his specific artistic orientation,Madai's poems incarnate some particular artistic style of elegance and vigour. Section two pays attention to the artistic features of Madai's poems. Madai was especially good at describing the scenery as well as composing an eight-line poem with five characters to a line and a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme. What's more, Madai's poems incarnate the knot of the poet's nostalgia and his ideal of Zen.Chapter four discusses about Madai's poems on frontier fortress, which are not great in number but reach great artistic achievement. Madai's poems on frontier fortress not only bear the imprint of the time, transcend the decadence of the time, but also transfer and carry on the sprite of the flourishing age of Tang Dynasty. It is for this reason that they deserve further research.