Three Caos Creative Similarities And Differences And Their Causes

The three Caos (Cao cao,Cao pi and Cao zhi), father and sons, were outstanding representatives of Jian'an literature. With heritages from previous generations and the same historical context, it's little wonder they three shared certain similarities in their poetry. However, because of their different personalities and life experience, distinct differences could also be identified from their works. Cao cao's works showed masculine spirit, strength and a sense of glory and pity at the same time; Cao pi's, gentleness and beauty; Cao zhi's, first energetic and valiant, later became melancholy and sad.This present work compares their works in terms of subject matters and writing styles, and analyzes the reasons of their differences in writing from the influence of their status, experience, personalities, literary thought, and from the influence of the works of their contemporaries and peers.Chapter one focuses on the comparison of Three Caos' works' subject matters combined with their experience and creation background respectively. Subjects studied include: war and people's sufferings, military life, soldiers' missing of their women, banquet and travel. Same subjects, but different writing methods, approach and thoughts resulted in Three Caos' different art achievement in the same subject matters.Chapter two deals with the comparison of different styles of Three Caos' works. This chapter describes Three Caos' works in great detail, so the narration in the last chapter is relatively brief.Chapter three studies the reasons leading to the similarities and differences of Three Caos' works. The turbulent period added ruefulness and unhappiness to the Jian'an literary world. Living in this period of great turbulence, Three Caos got rid of other writers' habit of imitating or deriving from former works, and started their own original styles, opening a new world for poetry creation, paving a new way for later generations' artistic creation.Three Caos' different status, experience, personalities, literary thoughts had inherent effect on their artistic creation. The external influencing factors of Three Caos' poetry creation are as follows: Former works like The Book of Odes, Poetry of the South, Folk-song-styled Poems of Han Dynasty and Nineteen Ancient Poems; literators of the same period, especially The seven literators of Jian'an ;their Creative work and literary thoughts. These internal and external factors comprehensively contributed to the differences of Three Caos' poetry creation.