Leisure Culture And The Ci Poetry Of Tang And Song Dynasty

As an eternal psychological phenomenon and the spiritual home of human beings, leisure exerts a great and profound impact on the thought, spirit, and culture of all people, thus a notable and undoubted impact on literary writing and reading. By viewing the ci poetry of Tang and Song dynasty from the perspective of leisure culture, this paper attempts to establish a relation between the emergence, development and propagation of this poetry, and the eternal needs for leisure from human spirit, thus to regard the creation of the poetry as the creation of life, and as the self-consciousness of life among those men of letters. Therefore, the cultural position of the individual-life-experiencing-centered, emotion-and-inclination-dominated ci poetry in the psychology and spirit of the poets of Tang and Song dynasty may be made clear. By making a re-examination of the ci poetry, this paper connects the propagation of it with the then aesthetic and entertaining needs of towns-people culture, and also, connects its stylistic features with the leisure mood of the men of letters and scholars to the extent that the significance and values of leisure culture and the entertaining spirit embodied in the emergence, propagation and development of ci poetry may be recovered.