A Brief Literary Analysis Of Song Qi

As an important figure in the early period of the Northern Song Dynasty, Song Qi has the following three identities as the official servant, literary writer and historian. As the official servant, he concerned much about the national affairs as well as people’s livelihood, signifying profound loyalty to the empire; as the literary writer, he made the most of various writing skills and techniques to create numerous influential literary works; as the historian, he even completed in compiling such 72 famous collected biographies as New Book of Tang. Among the above mentioned, there is no doubt that what strikes us most should be his great contribution to the literary writing of the Northern Song Dynasty. In his early period of writing, his works were called the outcome of XiKun, a kind of literary form which is popular in the early period of the Northern Song Dynasty, but in the later period, he opposed much against the fixed rules and regulations and preferred creating his own conventions which has played a significant role in the transition from the Hanyu’s opinion making use of the essay writing skills to create poems to the Jiangxi Poetry Group. Song Qi’s poems were influenced by his predecessor such as Wen Tingyun and Wei Zhuang who are all the representatives of Huanjian Poet and at the same time touched such poets as Zhou Bangyan, and Wu Wenying who put great emphasis on the writing technique of careful revision of the poetry. He often expressed his emotion and feeling freely without any interruption which caused many number of literary works with various kinds of different topics and writing techniques, attracting more and more people to conduct researches about them. The paper has combined Song Qi’s life with some interesting anecdotes to explore his literary works, contribution and writing skills so as to have a clear understanding of his influence and impact on others both in his times and later period and then explore his luxurious and wild official life on the background of early period of the Northern Song Dynasty in order to build a more rational evaluation on his romantic life.The paper was divided into four chapters. The first one emphasized on Song Qi’s personal life, the official career as both the literary one and historical one in order to show his diversity of political life which was combined with the special political atmosphere of the early period of the Northern Song Dynasty. The second one made use of Song Qi’s literary works to investigate the specific hidden content details. The following chapter researched about Song Qi’s literary aspiration which is totally different from other papers, because the paper did not separate his literary opinions of his different living period from each other but combined them together. To put in a more specific manner, the paper divided them into four parts:innovation, careful revision, making use of the essay writing skills to create poems and following Huanjian’s opinion. The last chapter showed Song Qi’s literary significance and influence from the perspective of poem and Ci. His poems influenced the later poet Huang Tingjian, a representative of Jiangxi Poetry Group and his Ci provided a good example for the Ci composer with excellent skills to polish their works. Morever, the paper also made a comprehensive classification and analysis of Ci’s influence about his famous verse Spring glittering where apricot blossoming.