The Expression Of ’Tradition’ And The Improvement Of Poetic Art

The development of the Chinese modern poetry is always accompanied by the confrontations of ’oriental/western’ and ’ancient/modern’. But some excellent poets are able to struggle out of the confrontations and find the way to improve their poetic art. The poems of Zhang Zao are famous with the quality called ’Classic’. But after deep reading, you also can feel the quality called ’Modern’. However, it doesn’t mean that the quality of "classic" is only a embellishment. In this article, I discussed Zhang Zao’s comprehension of ’tradition’ and how the comprehension worked in the growing of the writing originality. Zhang Zao said:’Tradition is in the future, not in the past; the key of tradition is the invention of poetry.’But the more important thing is to find out that how to ’invent’ the poetry, and if the statement that ’tradition is in the future’ corresponds to his poetry writing. Therefore, my discussion is about the poetic art. In three parts which are language-quality, the way of description and the theme called ’Zhi Yin’, I analyzed the relationship between the expression about ’tradition’ and the growing of his poetic art. And the analysis of the three poetic parts is by the way named ’intensive reading of the text’. In this way, I evaluated the maturity and originality of his poetic art. For the past writing of Chinese modern poetry, the influence of tradition is negative rather than positive. But Zhang Zao’s poetry writing has showed the differences from this statement.