A Research Of The Yuan Mei’s Theory Of Poem

Yuan Mei flies his own colors with his theory of spirituality in Qing Dynasty. Itcounterattacked and cleaned out all kinds of revivalism and formalism of popular inthe poetry world that he lived.His theory of poem changed Qing Dynasty’s poetrystyle, and its contribution was big and far-reaching. Yuan Mei’s theory of poem waspopular in the world, and it was grand and magnificent. He and Zhao Yi and JiangShi-quan were known as the “three greatest poets during the reign of Emperors QianLong and Jia Qing”,but formed a huge spirituality group.It presented a grandsituation that many people who agreed with his theory of poem talked aboutspirituality when they tried to creat poems.Yuan Mei’s theory of spirituality suched true feelings as basic and advocated“Poem should write poets’emotion”, that was from the poetry content and asked forpoets to express the true feelings, and enriched the content of the poetry with the turefeeling.It is can be regarded as the core part of his poetic views.Yuan Mei thoughtthat only poets expressed the true feelings, the poem can reflect their own lyricalnature and show the natural, pure, fresh, lively, witty and unique artistic charm.Whether the poets expressed theirs feelings was treated as a standard of collectingand evaluating poetry. But he set himself an example, he put his poetic views intopractice.Yuan Mei not only suggested that poem creators should express their truefeelings, but also analyzed the certain poetic talent that poets should be born with. Inhis opinion, different people had different poetic genius, which led to the twodifferent situation: Someone was good at creating, but others were not. Therefore,the relationship between spiritual and creative inspiration was then built, whichfocused on poetic talent played an important part in poetry writing. Yuan Meipromoted the role of talent to an absolute position with exaggeration, absolutelanguages. So his thoughts were mistook by some scholars who did the researchabout Yuan Mei’s poetic. In fact, throughout Yuan Mei’s poetic views and his ownworks, we can learn that he realized the importance of talent in creating, at the sametime, he did not deny the importance of learning. Yuan Mei was capricious and free throughout his life. He clearly realized thateach person’s character was different, so the poetry creator should express thieremotions and reflect the spirit of “me”, and he emphasized “Creating poetry can notbe without me.” in the process of creation and appreciation of poetry, Yuan stressedthat poetry should show the distinctive feature. He strongly opposed to the factorsthat restricted poets to express their true feelings. Yuan Mei firmly advocated thatevery poet should create his own works instead of copying others works. In addition,Yuan Mei realized that times were changing, and so did the society. So poetrycreating also should follow the step of changes. Yuan Mei also agreed that poetry,not only in ideological content but also artistic form, should be innovated. In theother word, poets should create poems with new and fashionable words to express anew idea. Above all, the opinions and thoughts on poetry suggested that poemsshould be distinctive and creative, and that they should reveal strong pursuit ofindividuality and creativity.