Comparison Between Emily Dickinson And Li Qingzhao's Poetry

With the development and communication of culture, people in the world treat culture as their common spiritual wealth. Our classical literature has rich meaning and special style, and it is accepted by other nations. In the meantime, foreign literature is also mingled into our own culture. Poetry as a form of literature is also being mingled together. This thesis attempts to compare Li Qingzhao (1084-1155, Sung Dynasty of ancient China) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886 Amherst, Massachusetts, America) who made great contributions to their own nations.In the present paper, the author discusses the differences between their poetry in the sense of Linguistics according to different families of language. English and Chinese languages belong to different families of language. English is in the Indo—European Family which is intonation language and Chinese is in the Sino-Tibetan Family which is tone language. There are 429 syllables except the falling tone in Chinese and about 1200 syllables in English. Every kind of language is constructed by basic linguistic elements. Grams are the elementary elements of Chinese and they are monosyllabic. Words are basic elements in English. A few of them are monosyllabic and quite a lot are multisyllabic. Most of the syllables in Qingzhao Li's poems are vowel syllables. There are few syllables ending in consonants. So her poem is not influenced by it and then the rhyme of vowel can produce a loud and lasting sound effect. Furthermore, almost every rhyme can correspond to hundreds or even thousands of grams. So it is easy to write a poem with one rhyme in Chinese. That's why Qingzhao Li's poems always have a few or only a certain rhyme from the beginning to the end. In Chinese every gram is a syllable, so the number of grams is also the number of syllables. Therefore, Chinese grams can construct beautiful poems like 4 grams verse, 5 grams verse, 7grams verse and free verse. While English words are monosyllable, most of which are multisyllabic, so word is not the smallest element of a poem, but syllable is. Every line of a Chinese poem can be one sentence, but it is not so for an English poems. If a line of an English poem is not a complete sentence, it will continue on the next line, which is called enjambment. However, in Emily Dickinson's poems, there are a great number of consonant ending syllables, which badly influence the loudness and lasting effect of the rhyme. Moreover, there are usually many rhymes in her poems and she hardly uses only one certain rhyme.Furthermore, to seek their similarities as female poets, the author continues to explore their thoughts in the Feminist approach. Emily Dickinson and Li Qingzhao are famous US-Sino poetesses. Their poetry symbolizes the weakness of Feminist consciousness. Dickinson studied in a female college which made a firm basis for her literary works. She lived a single life and made use of most of her time writing poems in order to throw away the confines of women. Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) born in Jinan City of Shandong Province East China in 1084, is the most accomplished woman poet in Chinese literary history. Her father was a distinguished scholar, so during her childhood she had access to a large number of books and could recite many poems, which paved a solid road for her later writing. Luckily, she married Zhao Mingcheng, who had abundant knowledge about metal sculpture, jade carving, painting and calligraphy. The couple shared a lot in common and lived peacefully and happily during North Sung Dynasty, which can be clearly revealed in her early poems. They bravely broke the confines of society to write poetry about love. Both of them seek expectation and ambition. They were not like the common women in their time, because they were thirsty for freedom and an ideal life.At the end of the thesis, the author will compare their poetry in Imagist Approach. Neither Emily nor Li's poems are very long. None of Emily's poems are more than 100 lines nor are li's poems more than 50 lines. They use fewer grams and words to represent a more colorful world that appeals to our senses by giving us a vivid picture. In their mind poetry is the spontaneous outflow of the poets'feeling or thought, in which image takes an important place. That's why their poetry has so many unique and special images. Both of them are great at colloquial language. Li has about 50 poems, and nearly 75% of them have flower images. From her poems, we can conclude that she is very fond of flowers. There are many flower images in Li Qingzhao's poems such as plum blossom, chrysanthemum, Chinese flowering crabapple, and so on. The choice has something to do with her experience, and with Sung Dynasty's background of history, and politics. The flower image shows that she pursues and cherishes beauty and life. Thomas H. Johnson made Emily Dickinson's complete body of 1,775 poems available in his 1955 variorum edition. Her poems can be classified into four topics: life, nature, love, immorality and death.