Native place: Chu Danyang (now Zigui, Hubei)
Representative works: Li Sao, Nine Songs, Nine Chapters, Tian Wen, etc.
Literary achievements:
Qu Yuan is a poet, and only from him did China have a writer famous for his literature. He founded the style of "Chu Ci" (also known as "Sao Style"), and was praised as "a poet in clothes, not a generation". Qu Yuan's works, according to the collation of Liu Xiang, Liu Xin and Wang Yi's notes, total 25 articles, focusing on expressing the author's inner feelings. Li Sao is a magnificent poem created by Qu Yuan with his own ideals, experiences, pains, enthusiasm and even his whole life. It shines with bright personality and is the focus of all Qu Yuan's creations. Tian Wen is a poem written by Qu Yuan according to myths and legends, which embodies the author's academic attainments and views on history and nature. "Nine Songs" is Qu Yuan's music for offering sacrifices to the gods in Chu. It is full of life breath in the expression of characters' feelings and the description of environmental atmosphere. However, it is the expression of generations or gods, rather than the author's self-lyric, which shows more traces of the literary tradition of southern Chu. Li Sao and Nine Songs constitute the basic style of Qu Yuan's works.
The style of Qu Yuan's works is obviously different from the Book of Songs. The Book of Songs and Songs of the South represent two regional cultures respectively, and the Book of Songs embodies the orthodox and rigorous ideas and behavior patterns of Confucianism, which has far-reaching influence in the Yellow River basin. Romanticism, represented by Qu Yuan's Lisao, embodies the rebellious spirit of Taoist heresy and is widely spread in the Yangtze River basin. This is related to the differences in folk customs between the Yangtze River Basin and the Yellow River Basin. At that time, the north had entered the patriarchal society, and Chu still had the legacy of clan society, which was tough and lively, and was not bound by etiquette. Therefore, the expression of love between men and women and patriotism is so straightforward, and the materials used are so rich that everything can run to the bottom of the pen. Write about the love between man and God, crazy people, ancient historical legends, and traveling with ghosts and gods. All gods have ordinary human nature among the people, and God is just a person beyond ordinary people. They make their works look bright, full of emotion and unrestrained. This kind of works shows different characteristics from northern literature. From the institutional point of view, Qu Yuan's previous poems, whether the Book of Songs or southern folk songs, were mostly short stories, and Qu Yuan developed into a long and huge system. Li Sao alone has more than 2,400 words. In terms of expression techniques, Qu Yuan skillfully combined Fu, Bi and Xing, and made extensive use of the Bi Xing technique of "vanilla beauty" to vividly express abstract morality, consciousness and complex realistic relations.
In terms of language form, Qu Yuan's works have broken through the four-sentence pattern in The Book of Songs, with each sentence ranging from five, six, seven, eight and nine characters, as well as three sentences and cross sentences. Grammar is uneven and flexible. The word "Xi" and function words such as "Zhi", "Yu", "Hu" and "Er" are often used at the end of sentences to coordinate syllables and produce cadence, singing and sighing effects. In a word, his works are very creative from content to form.
Qu Yuan's works had a greater influence after the Chu people established Guanzhong, the capital of the Han Dynasty. With the continuous study and development of Songs of the South, the literature in the north has gradually become Chu. The new five-character poems and seven-character poems are all related to Chu Sao. Fu writers in Han Dynasty were all influenced by Chu Ci. After the Han Dynasty, works of "Shao Sao" appeared in all previous dynasties. The author often uses Qu Yuan's poems to express his own obstacles, and even uses Qu Yuan's experience as a metaphor, which is the direct development of Qu Yuan's literature. In addition, there are poems, songs, lyrics, songs, dramas, Qin lyrics, Daqu, scripts and so on. Take the life story of Qu Yuan as the theme, such as The Portrait of Qu Yuan, Nine Songs, Nine Tweens, etc. It is also difficult to count. Therefore, Lu Xun called Qu Yuan's works "outstanding" and "its influence on later articles is even above 300 (The Book of Songs)" (Lu Xun's Outline of China Literature History). Guo Moruo, a famous poet, once wrote Ode to Thunder and Electricity for him to commemorate his deeds.
Qu Yuan's works are full of positive romantic spirit. Its main performance is that he integrated his passionate pursuit of ideals into artistic imagination and magical artistic conception. For example, Li Sao wrote that after he gave a speech to Zhong Hua, he went against the wind. He knocked at the heavenly palace first, but the emperor didn't accept it. He begged a girl who happened not to be there; He pursued Fu Fei, but Fu Fei was rude to him; He wanted Judy and Er Yao, but he didn't have a good matchmaker to deliver the news. This fantasy and pursuit of going to heaven and going to earth embodies Qu Yuan's hard pursuit of ideals in reality. In addition, Nine Songs and Tian Wen also use a lot of myths and historical legends as materials, with bold and rich imagination, which is rare in ancient and modern times.
Besides, Qu Yuan's works also use a series of metaphors to express his feelings. For example, he used flowers and herbs to describe a noble gentleman; Use smelly things and Xiao Ai as metaphors for traitors or disloyal villains; Wearing vanilla symbolizes the poet's moral cultivation. This technique of "vanilla beauty" makes a sharp contrast between loyalty, ugliness, goodness and evil in reality, and produces a concise and endless artistic effect.
Posterity evaluation:
The controversy about Qu Yuan in Han Dynasty can be divided into three stages, the first stage is from the early Han Dynasty to the Xuandi period in the Western Han Dynasty, the second stage is from the end of the Western Han Dynasty to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and the third stage is from the Andi period in the Eastern Han Dynasty to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty. The dispute between scholars and Qu Yuan in Han Dynasty reflects the change of academic concept in Han Dynasty: in the first stage, scholars ruled the country with the skill of Huang Lao, and they held a positive attitude towards Qu Yuan at this stage; The second stage is the exclusive period of Confucianism. At this stage, Yang Xiong, Ban Gu, Jia Kui and others were critical of Qu Yuan. The third stage is the decline of Confucian classics. Wang Yi, Ying Shao, Xun Yue and others tried their best to improve Qu Yuan's position.
In modern times, it is generally believed that Qu Yuan was the first great patriotic poet in the history of China, the founder of China's romantic literature, and was known as "the father of China's poetry" and "the father of Ci and Fu". He is the founder and representative author of Chu Ci, which started the tradition of "vanilla beauty".
1953 is the 2230th anniversary of Qu Yuan's death. The World Peace Council adopted a resolution to identify Qu Yuan as one of the four world cultural celebrities commemorated that year.