From "wheat" To "stone" See Death Philosophy

Haizi and Celan have respectively inspired the attentions from both the poetry circles ofChina and Germany with their unique poetic thoughts and artistic approaches. The literary circleand critic circle have already studied deeply in the life conscious and philosophical thoughtreflected in their poems. Though the works written by literary circle and critics circle are variousenough, few of them do research in the characteristics of the images and the thoughts of deathphilosophy those images contained in their poems, and especially rare of them deal with thecomparative study between their poems.Through studying the short poems of Hanzi and Celan, this thesis indicates that althoughthe two poets have different nationalities and were born in different times, the choices of theirpoetic images and the philosophical thoughts the images contain show many similarities byreceiving mutual influences, for example, they send out the message of “death” by employingimages through “darkness”, which reflect the thought of death in modern western philosophy.And the frequently appeared core images like “wheat” and “stone” are the focus of the study inthis thesis because of their duality, that is, the dichotomy in wholeness, such as love and hated,hope and despair. This duality is binary opposed, and is the biggest contradiction torturing themind of the poets: the poetic ideal and the cruel reality.The first chapter of this thesis applies the mode of parallel study to analyze the duality ofimages and the contradictory feeling attached on them in the poems of Hanzi and Celan. Thesecond chapter traces the origin and makes a comparison between their life backgrounds, lifeexperiences and creating experiences, getting the relationship between poets,“wheat” and“stone”. The third chapter introduces the influence of Holderlin’s poetics and Heidegger’sexistential philosophy on them, and finds out that serving as a “media”, Holderlin and Heideggermake the poetic images of two poets containing the same philosophical thoughts, so that theirpoems are cross reference and intertextual. The two poets delicately merge “death philosophy”in the duality of their poetic images, so that, their commitment of suicides by different styles in their heydays are no longer enigmas. The belief “being toward death” offers a reliable prooftowards the certainty of their deaths.