Mei Yichen's Narrative Poetry Research

Mei Yaochen,a very famous realistic poet in the Northern Song dynasty,has a collection of more than two thousand poems.Contrary to the the genre of Xikun(a school of poems in the Song dynasty),his poems are characterized by pureness and novelty,thus he was renowned as the father of poems in the Song dynasty.As for the monographs of relative research on the poems of Mei Yaochen,the earliest is A Collection of Mei Yaochen’s poems written by Xia Jingguan in the period of the Republic of China.Later in the 1980 s,lots of works about Mei’s poems appeared.Among them the most influential is the chronological book Notes to Mei’s Poems chiefly edited by Zhu Dongrun,A Collection of Mei’s Poems and Autobiography of Mei Yaochen.Entering into the 21 st century,however,there are few academic works about Mei’s poems and its study.There existed only one work co-edited by Zhou Lei and Zhou Yigan;what’s more,relative study on Mei’s poems mainly focus on journals,papers and thesis and the perspectives of its study are greatly limited in aspects such as genre,style,thoughts and contents,etc.Nowadays,the research of the poems in the Song dynasty once attracts the attention of scholars and meantime the study on poems begins to focus on the poem itself.Therefore,the author will illustrate the charm of the poems itself on the basis of Mei’s poems.In this paper,the author will have an analysis of Mei’s narrative poems.Starting with the poems itself,the author will analyze the poems from the perspectives of history,culture and literature.First,summarize the development of narrative poems and the process of poems’ creation.Second,explore the relations between Mei’s narrative poems and the narrative genres like fables,diary.Besides,probe into the multiple perspectives of Mei’s poems.Last,conclude the influence of painting arts on narrative poems.After a general illustration and analysis,we can find that Mei’s poems play an important part in the development of narrative poems of the Song dynasty.