On The Study Of Hsu Yao-Guang’s Forty-two Poems——The Book Of Poetry Revisited

Forty-two Poems—The Book of Poetry Revisited, is a group of poems in the Snow-gate Poetry which is the poetry anthology of Hsu Yao-Guang who is an official poet in Qing Dynasty. Hsu’s recorded the youth reading experience of The Book of Poetry in the form of “poems of interpreting poems”. Hsu’s feeling and perception on The Book of Poetry generally including three aspects: traditional Confucian doctrine extolled and discrimination of basic questions on The Book of Poetry, detection of The Book of Poetry aesthetic, recording personal life as well as understanding the facts and truth of the poems. Hsu’s not only celebrates traditional Confucian poetry teaching, advocating poetic and ritual, following the thought of filial piety, practicing Confucian poetic doctrine concept; but Hsu’s has a considerable degree of study on the Confucian classics, and has his own unique insights on the basic problems, such as the fact of Confucius compiled poetry, Feng Ya and Zheng Bian, poetic theme and lexical meaning. Hsu’s also discovers the unique artistic value of The Book of Poetry from the aesthetic dimension, the beauty of the resemblance between both chapters and sentences, the true of the artistic expression, the great influence on future generations. However, different from the traditional and old exegetical way, he focuses on the individual emotional, aesthetic, personal life experience to understand aspects of classics, reflecting the acceptance process of classic in the ordinary intellectuals after The Book of Poetry down the altar.Forty-two Poems—The Book of Poetry Revisited has three striking features: to understand poems in the way of Jing and Zi; to understand poems in the way of his experience; to translate in rhyme. Corresponding to this, Forty-two Poems belongs to the sub category of poems chant Jing and Zi and poems of interpreting poems, namely poems of poetry. Through the two dimensions of poems chant Jing and Zi and poems of interpreting poems, Forty-two poems artistic value mainly manifested in the literary criticism of The Book of Poetry.In addition to the content, the special value is also reflected in the form of poems. Hsu’s chooses the genre of “poems of interpreting poems” to further expand the performance areas of poetic argumentation, which has an impact on the development of the Qing poetics. It is why that the genre of quatrain poses some restrictions on artistic expression of the group of poems. The genre of quatrain restricts the freedom of expression in words, rhyming and other aspects of poetry, so that Hsu’s needs to compensate for the incomplete poetry meaning by adding notes and preface.However the defects can’t obscure the virtues. Judging by the comments and assessment on the poems, the artistic value of the group of poems is still outstanding. Especially, the most artistic part of all is the detection of The Book of Poetry aesthetic, reflecting Hsu’s keen artistic vision, profound artistic accomplishment and accessibility of personal feelings.