Hui Tong, Of The Aesthetic Consciousness Of The Chinese Classical Poetry And Anglo-american Modern Poetry

Wai-lim Yip, as a overseas scholar, has many great influences on the studies of Chinese poetry and Taoist aesthetics. With plenty of academic works, his theoretic studies mainly refer to the comparison and communication between Chinese languages and western ones and their aesthetic characteristics. Through comparing Chinese culture and the western culture, he points out that there are great differences in grammar and aesthetics between Chinese poetry and western poetry. On this basis, he affirms the aesthetic characteristics of classical Chinese poetry, and considers that the strongpoint of classical Chinese poetry on aesthetics and grammar may repair the shortcoming of western poetry. Wai-lim Yip also analyzes the consistency expressed in aesthetic consciousness between modern western poetry and classical Chinese poetry.The thesis can be divided into three parts, Taking Wai-lim Yip's poetic works and his composing practice as the case study, to pursue the jumping-off place of Wai-lim Yip's theory among similarities and differences and explore the developing track of his theoretics.Taking language as the starting point, chapter one introduces Wai-lim Yip's ideas about the differences on language and aesthetics expressing between Chinese poetry and western poetry in the progress of his translating poetry, and then dissertates his sureness towards the special expressing method that "language makes silence". Wai-lim Yip regards that the expressing method that "language makes silence" makes classical Chinese poetry get the beauty of "things and I are both bright" and approach the "world named before" more easily. Following this, the thesis takes Wai-lim Yip's study on Ezra Pound as an example to analyze the apocalypse that classical Chinese poetry and its aesthetic consciousness made to the Anglo-American modern poetry.Starting with images, chapter two points out that the "image of its own" is one of the methods that classical Chinese poetry and the Anglo-American modern poetry construct aesthetic consciousness. First, according to Wai-lim Yip's poetic theory, this chapter analyzes the aesthetic tension constructed by the "image of its own" in classical Chinese poetry, which he called "the effect of mercury" or "montage"; then the chapter discusses Wai-lim Yip's study on composing methods of T. S. Eliot and classical Chinese poets. He notices that both of them construct the aesthetic consciousness by arranging images though T. S. Eliot has no contact with classical Chinese poets.Chapter three refers to Wai-lim Yip's philosophical thoughts on the communication of aesthetic consciousness between Chinese poetry and western poetry. Enlightened by phenomenology, associating with that and Taoist aesthetics in Chinese traditional culture, Wai-lim Yip points out that it is because of the different methods in viewing things between China and the West that the different aesthetic consciousness occurs among them. Thus this chapter analyzes the ideas on methods of viewing things in Wai-lim Yip's poetic theory firstly, and then explores the modern western philosophers' and poets' pursuit to the "nature of things themselves" and the blending between phenomenology and Taoist aesthetics on the lay of pursuing the essence of the world.