Research On GuanXiu’s Political Career

GuanXiu is a red-letter monk-poet in the late Tang and Five Dynasties, as a result of not only the unique style of his poetry, calligraphy and paintings, but also his lay behavior of associating with officers and lords. GuanXiu’s participation in the political leads to lots of invective. However, when people are personally on the confused scene in the late Tang and Five Dynasties, they’ll understand that this behavior is due to the long history of monk-poet’s link to the politics, the particular history background and GuanXiu’s own personality and ideas. This monk read a lot of the Confucian classics during his childhood, setting up his ideal of helping people and the frank mettle. During his political career, GuanXiu wrote a significant number of political poems, which are the way for scholars now to study GuanXiu’s inner experience and political views.This paper focuses on the political career and political poems of GuanXiu, and can be roughly divided into three parts:the first part, through recognizing GuanXiu’s life, sorts out the chronology of GuanXiu’s political career. The second part tries to figure out theme types of GuanXiu’s political poems from the research of his poetry anthology, and sums up there are six main theme types:for the lord, asked by the lord, friendship, satire, civilian life and ideals. The third part, based on the first two parts of study, discusses the relationship between GuanXiu’s political career and political poems, and sums up GuanXiu’s political views in his political poems:the view of war, the expection of benevolent lord and uncorrupted government.