Study On The Poems

Ji Dong(1624-1675), courtesy name(zi) Pucao, was born in Wujiang. He was a student(zhusheng) and a member of “Shen Jiao Society” during the late Ming Dynasty. After the establishment of Qing Dynasty he participated in the imperial examination and ranked the second at the provincial level and the seventh in the palace examination. Afterwards, he took part in the exam many times but was never nominated. At the age of thirty-three, he was involved in the political case “Jiangnan Tax Report.” As a result, he was deprived of the title of “provincial graduate.” In order to pursue scholarly honor and official rank and to earn a living, he traveled all around China in the following nineteen years and established close relationships with adherents of Ming Dynasty and officials of Qing Dynasty. He was a well-known figure during the time he lived. He died of Yingshang disease in a strange land at the age of fifty-two. Only three years after his death, the Qing Government added the “generic learned words” to the imperial examination which he was so adept at. All his friends lamented his talent. His Gai Pavilion Poems of six volumes and Gai Pavilion Collected Works of 16 volumesare kept and handed down after his death. Ji Dong was good at many poetic forms and had his own style. His rich traveling experience and communication with people from different walks of life are helpful in understanding his works. Ji Dong’s prose enjoyed more fame than his poems. On the one hand, being argumentative but not monotonous, his prose is the residence of many insights. This results from the combination of his experience of long-time traveling and the frustration of his unrecognized talent. His achievement in prose-writing brought him some fame. On the other hand, the maturity of Ji Dong’s prose was in accordance with the literary tendency of the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty which was a transition from the prose of reflection to the prose of purity and elegance. Ji Dong’s prose itself was the representative of the early Qing Dynasty, and its literary practice contributed to the emergence and prosperity of the later Tongcheng School. This thesis begins with the introduction to Ji Dong’s life experience and analyses the depressed emotion expressed implicitly in his poems in detail. By highlighting and comprehensively discussing the artistic characteristics of his poems, it traces out the reason of the prevalence of ancient style prose in early Qing Dynasty and explores how it corresponded to the orthodox literary style proposed by the Qing Government. Lastly, it makes a thorough inquiry into the literary value of Ji Dong’s works.