| Fu Xuan lived during the entire period of the Wei Dynasty (220-280AD) and the initial period of the Western Jin Dynasty (265-316AD). Of his over 130 intact poems handed down to the present day, Music Bureau poems, covering a wide variety of subjects, account for 88, which reflects that Fu Xuan is especially good at writing poems of such style. Thus, his standing in the History of Literature is to a large extent determined by his Music Bureau poems. Despite the large number of his poems, scholars who made research on the Literature of Wei and Jin Dynasty focused mainly on such poets as Zhang Hua, Ji Kang and Lu Ji. In other words, there is till now a very limited number of papers concerning Fu Xuan's individuality, spirit, and production of poems. Therefore, making a classified study on his Music Bureau poems from the political environment, prevailing customs, and cultural thoughts of his time and his character, is definitely crucial for a further research on the characteristics of Music Bureau poems and for discovering his influence on poems of the coming generations.The time of Wei and Jin Dynasties, with the society's long instability and breaking-up, a frequent change of government, constant suffering of the people, extravagance and vanity of public morale, is when Fu Xuan is literarily active. In the mean time, this period saw an all-dimensional turn in the aspects of politics, military affairs, philosophy, religion, thinking, and culture. As for philosophy thinking of that time, there appeared a co-existence of Confucianism and Taoism resulting from the declination of Confucianism and the revitalization of Taoism. Such social context nurtured Fu Xuan's character:cautious, observing etiquette, upright and above flattery, and adapting himself to circumstances, which all enormously affected his production of works of art.Fu Xuan's existing 88 Music Bureau poems cover various subjects and every aspect of life. They can mainly be classified into three categories:political poems produced for exchanging among officials; narrative poems, simple in form but rich in content, lyric poems, reflecting a feeling of sadness, grief with a sense of freshness and beauty. Of these three kinds of poems, the number of political poems is the largest. which mainly follow the poems of previous dynasties and continue to use long-existed titles and layouts with the intention of eulogizing the government's achievement and remonstrating its fundamental policies. Narrative poems consist of three sorts of content:describing military life and warfare, depicting marriage and love, and reflecting social morality. Lyric poems primarily reveal the author's anxiety, mourning the dead, and his ideals. The above three categories of poems, with their rich content and plentiful emotions, display their individual characteristics.Based on an analysis of the content of Fu Xuan's Music Bureau poems, we can obviously notice his simulating poems of previous dynasties. However, this simulation is not an act of thorough copying. Compared with Music Bureau poems of the Han Dynasty, Fu Xuan's works demonstrate different artistic features, such as adopting the form of rhapsody, using the Sao style now and then, using metaphors and method of associating out of love and expertise when writing poems. As a result, this paper analyze Fu Xuan's exploration and experiment of poems from the above three angles. His artistic achievement made him a key figure connecting the two stages of poem development, Jian An and Tai Kang, and exerted much influence on the poets in the Western Jin Dynasty and dynasties that followed, such as Lu Ji, Fu Xian, Zhang Hua and Bao Zhao. |
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