The Anshi Rebellion brought countless disasters and also brought changes to poetry creation. It was Du Fu who first and most comprehensively reflected the great damage and catastrophe caused by this war. Du Fu used his poems to write down many important events in this war, wrote down the sufferings of the people in the war, and showed a broad picture of the whole social life in the war with a profound and vivid image of flesh and blood. His poems are called "the history of poetry" by later generations.
His poems are called "the history of poetry" because of their historical cognitive value. Important historical events that are often mentioned are reflected in his poems. His poems provide historical facts, which can prove history and make up for its shortcomings.
However, the "poetic history" nature of Du Fu's poems is not that it provides historical facts. Historical facts only provide events, while Du Fu's poems provide a broader, more concrete and more vivid picture of life than events.
Second, Du Fu's narrative art
The historicity of Du Fu's poems determines the change of his creative methods. Poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty created exquisite images to express feelings, while Du Fu's poems wrote current events by narrative methods. The narrative technique of poetry originated very early and was used in the Book of Songs and Yuefu. Among the poets in the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai's "A Gift to Zhang" and "Farewell to a Bell" both used narrative techniques. Li Bai's poems describe his own loose-packed; Li Qi's poems actually describe Liang Zhong's character. The extensive use of narrative techniques to write current affairs in the style of five or seven words is to develop narrative techniques to a new peak, which is Du Fu's creation.
Du Fu's poems not only narrate events, but also pay attention to details. These details, or people, events or artistic conception, are carefully portrayed, and the truth can be seen from the details, which unfolds the picture and introduces people into a certain atmosphere and realm.
Du Fu's poems narrate things and blend in with strong lyricism. Most narrative poems are actually written as lyric.
The objective and true narration is integrated with the subjective and strong lyric. It is hard to say whether some of his poems are lyrical or narrative. Sometimes it is mixed with discussion, lyricism, narration and discussion. Long stories are like this, and so are short stories. There is the arrangement of fu, the syntax of prose and the artistic conception creation of lyric poetry. It describes current events, reflects the real picture of history and expresses its feelings. This is unprecedented in the history of China's poetry, and it is a change in the method of poetry expression, which is the difference between Du Fu's poetry and that of the Tang Dynasty.
Thirdly, Du Fu's contribution to the development of poetic style.
Rhyme plays an extremely important role in Du Fu's poems. Du Fu's current affairs poems are mostly archaic, because archaic is easy to describe. There is no doubt that his achievements in ancient times were great. However, his achievements in the art of poetry are even more brilliant.
The achievement of Du Fu's metrical poems lies in expanding the scope of expression of metrical poems. He not only writes about entertainment, nostalgia, travel, feasts and landscapes with Chang Song poems, but also writes about current events with Chang Song poems. There are fewer restrictions on writing current affairs in ancient Chinese, and most of Du Fu's poems on current affairs are ancient Chinese. It is difficult to write current affairs with metrical poems, but Du Fu can use them freely.
Du Fu writes metrical poems freely, changes as much as he can, conforms to the law without seeing the shackles of metrical poems, and is in neat opposition without seeing the traces of antithesis. For example, the banks of the Yellow River were recaptured by the imperial army:
The news of this distant western station! The north has been recovered! At first, I couldn't stop crying on my coat. Where are my wife and son? There is not a trace of sadness on their faces. He loves reading. On a green spring day, I began to go home, singing my songs loudly and drinking my wine. Come back from this mountain, pass another mountain, go up from the south and then go north-to my own town! .
The whole poem shows a sudden ecstasy vividly, and uses verbs such as "sudden biography", "first smell", "first sight" and "ramble" to strengthen the color of suddenness and randomness; Connecting four place names with words such as "cong", "cong", "cong", "cong" and "cong" has produced a lightning-fast trend. Like prose, the expression is fluent, coherent and integrated, and is not bound by law. The poems he wrote after living in Kuizhou reached perfection in this respect. Gordon, whom Yang Lun called "Du Ji's Seven-character Law", is a poem like this:
The wind is fast and high, the ape cries sadly, and the birds are circling in the white sand. The endless trees are rustling leaves, and the Yangtze River is rolling unpredictably. Li in the sad autumn scenery, a wanderer all the year round, lives alone on the high platform in today's illness. After all the hardships and hatred, the white hair is full, and the wine glasses are damaged.
The wind is urgent, apes scream, birds fly and trees fall, and with the rolling river, the whole realm is involved in the rushing water. Then there was a deep sigh. He used so many verbs with strong coherence in action, which made the whole poem have a flowing sense of wholeness and made people feel like a breath. However, on closer inspection, the whole poem is extremely complicated in terms of tonal sentence patterns. Eight sentences are all right, so is the first sentence. Strict antithesis is concealed by the fluency of the image, and strictness becomes sparse. The first word of the first couplet was replaced by a flat voice, and the first word of the next sentence was replaced by a flat voice. At the beginning, with the change of weight, two rhythms were added In order to make "sky high" and ape sound the same, he used the word "ape" in a flat voice. The three flat voices kept rising, the scream sank, the two ends fluctuated rapidly, and the last word "sadness" rose without return. This first sentence is really wonderful in expressing sound and image through careful arrangement of leveling.
The highest achievement of Du Fu's metrical poems can be said to be that this style is fluent and makes people forget that it is a metrical poem as soon as they are written. Such as "Jiangcun":
The clear river winds around the village, and everything in the village looks elegant in the long summer. Swallows on the beam fly freely, and blind dates in the water are similar and accompanied. The old lady is using a chessboard, and the younger son is making a hook with an injection. All you need for many diseases is medicine. What else can you ask for?
Speak in a friendly and casual tone, without showing signs of confrontation and musical arrangement. Delighting in Rain on a Spring Night:
Good rain knows the season, when spring comes. Sneak into the night with the wind, moisten things silently. The wild path is dark, and the river is bright. Look at the red and wet place, the flowers in Jinguancheng are heavy.
The last four sentences use flowing water to write down the charm of spring rain in one breath, unexpectedly and silently, and at the end, write a surprise that suddenly looks back, with rigorous meter and seamless structure. A Night Abroad is also a famous work of this kind.
Du Fu himself said, "The Evening Festival is getting thinner and thinner." ("Send boring nineteen Cao Chang") said: "Old poetry is muddy." This is his main pursuit of rhythmic poetry. The rhythm of fine poetry lies not only in the careful arrangement of melody, but also in seeking change from rigor, unpredictability and not deviating from the law. Sometimes in order to express some feelings, he wrote an awkward style, and in his later years he had seven laws. This awkward body is different from some irregular phenomena in the early period of the Seventh Law. It is a general change after maturity, showing the integrity of change.
Another achievement of Du Fu's regular poems lies in his success in choosing words and making sentences. He is good at using words and describing exquisitely, which is also reflected in his ancient style, and the performance of metrical poems is the most wonderful. He refines Chinese characters, and his strength is to express facial charm. That's what Liu Xizai meant when he said "an alchemist in Shaoling". His words are often less than one word, and it is difficult for others to change. He is good at using verbs to make poetry alive, and adverbs to make poetry smooth and full of turning points, especially the word "zi". He really uses it well. He is also good at using color words to strengthen a certain emotional color, using reduplicated words to create an atmosphere, using disyllabic rhymes to make the tone of poetry more harmonious and pleasant, and using colloquial words to make poetry more intimate to read. Refining Chinese characters is his conscious pursuit. He once said, "If you feel lonely about human nature, you will never stop talking." He spent a lot of energy on refining Chinese characters.
Fourth, the artistic style of Du Fu's poems
The main style feature of Du Fu's poems is depression and frustration, and the emotional tone of the depression and frustration style is sadness. Du Fu is a poet who cares about national security and people's sufferings. In turbulent times, personal setbacks are full of sadness at the touch. There is a deep anxiety in his poems, whether it is sketching people's sufferings, homesickness for friends, or writing about his own poverty, his feelings are profound and broad. His poems contain an accumulated emotional force. Every time he wants to spit it out, his kindness and his Confucian self-restraint form a neutral attitude towards life, which suppresses the grief that is about to spit it out and makes it slow, deep and low. The long chapter is like this, and so is the short chapter.