A Study Of Pre-Tang Garden Poetry

Garden poetry takes the garden as the object of description,mainly writing about the garden itself,the poet’s life in the garden and the emotions arising from it.Before the Tang Dynasty,garden poetry was generated and developed along with the creation and development of ancient Chinese gardens,and became a wondrous flower in the garden of ancient Chinese poetry.It carries the history of the construction of pre-Tang gardens and has formed unique emotional content and specific artistic style in its long-term development.Through the study of pre-Tang garden poetry,we can not only recognize the literary value of garden poetry itself,but also discover the close connection between the creation of garden poetry and various factors such as garden development,garden types,political culture,and poets’ mentality,which has high research value.On the basis of the concept of garden poetry,this paper summarizes and organizes the extant pre-Tang garden poems,counting 276 pre-Tang garden poems,and divides them into three categories: royal garden poetry,private garden poetry,and Buddhist temple garden poetry,using the type of garden described in the poems as the criterion.Pre-Tang royal garden poetry was produced at the earliest time and in the largest quantity.Restricted by the class attributes of royal gardens,pre-Tang royal garden poetry was mainly composed in the feast gatherings of with various themes such as poetry meetings,festive feasts and farewell feasts convened by the emperor,and the magnificent garden landscape and the rich and beautiful feast scenes were the main objects of pre-Tang royal garden poetry,and showed distinct political characteristics.Private garden poetry appeared later in the pre-Tang period,and the first depictions of private gardens appeared in the Yuefu poems of the Han Dynasty.In the private and intimate space of private gardens,poets were able to express their individual emotions,and pre-Tang private garden poetry showed the poets’ complex emotions of joy,pain,and contradiction,in contrast to the single expression of emotions in royal garden poetry.At the same time,private garden poetry got rid of the political characteristics of royal garden poetry and pursued the naturalness of poetry’s material,language and mood.The pre-Tang Buddhist temple garden poetry started the latest,but developed rapidly,covering three major creative subjects: emperors,scholars,and monks,including Buddhist temple garden tours,dedication to emperors,and inscriptions on Buddhist temples,with a large number of Buddhist terms,imagery,ideas,and meanings appearing in the poems,revealing a strong Buddhist meaning.The poetry of pre-Tang royal gardens,private gardens and Buddhist monasteries differed in their thematic content,emotional expression and artistic characteristics,and together they constituted a pre-Tang garden poetry with rich content and various artistic forms.