-It is meaningless to argue about which poems of Li Bai and Cui Hao are better or worse.
Since Li Bai was relegated to Tianbao and went to Jinling to write "Nanjing Climbing the Phoenix Tower", poetic theorists of past dynasties have repeatedly compared, studied and commented on it with "Yellow Crane Tower", trying to draw an absolute conclusion that Li is better than Cui or Cui is not as good as Li.
For example, Yan Yu, the author of Cang Lang Shi Hua, said, "When the Yellow Crane Tower in Cui Hao is the first"; When commenting on Phoenix Tower, Wu Changqi also said that it was "not as good as the Yellow Crane Tower" ("Deleting Tang Poems"); Although seemingly fair, Liu Kezhuang described it as a "real opponent's chess" ("Hou Lin's Poetry"); It is also a muddle along, saying that "let Cui tune, the style will be inferior to Li" (note on the Complete Works of Li Bai), but Liu and Wang still mean to be better than Li and Cui, and put you in front of me.
Today, Mr. Wang is even more anti-ancient, bluntly trying to correct the prejudice of his predecessors and putting forward the "novel" argument that "Li Shi is superior to Cui" and "Cui is not as good as Li". The title of one of his articles is very simple, that is, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Li Bai's Landing in Nanjing to the Phoenix Terrace and Cui Hao's The Yellow Crane Tower.
In fact, whether it is the ancients' "restraining Li Yang and Cui" or today's people like Mr. Zhang's "respecting Li and restraining Cui", their common fallacy is that they all ignore such an important point: Phoenix Tower and Yellow Crane Tower are not very comparable. If you compare the incomparable things far-fetched, you will never get a result, just as no one can point out and thank who is more beautiful. Phoenix Terrace was written by Li Bai in Jinling, thousands of miles away from the Yellow Crane Tower, many years after the Yellow Crane Tower. Its writing time, place, scenery and mentality are the same as the Yellow Crane Tower in Cui Hao, which has nothing to do with it. You always have to compare poems that are independent. How can it be compared?
If we make a concrete and brief analysis of the Yellow Crane Tower and Phoenix Terrace, we can know that there is no difference between winning and losing masterpieces that shine in their own inherent coordinates.
Let's look at Cui Hao's first. Many people have read the Yellow Crane Tower in Cui Hao:
The fairy of the past has flown away by the yellow crane, leaving only an empty Yellow Crane Tower.
The yellow crane never revisited earth, there have been no long white clouds for thousands of years.
Every tree in Hanyang has become clear due to sunlight, and Nautilus Island is covered with sweet grass.
But I looked home, the twilight was boundless, and the waves of the river were filled with sad mist!
Generally speaking, the works of climbing mountains and facing water are easy to get stuck in stereotypes and difficult to do well. When Cui Hao wrote this poem, he wisely foresaw that it was difficult to write the well-known Yellow Crane Tower with ordinary brushwork, so he boldly found another way, got rid of the traditional barrier of measuring with a horizontal ruler, and relied on well-known myths and legends to connect three "Yellow Crane Towers" into the poem with sudden momentum at the beginning of the poem. In this way, the theme is clearly pointed out, and the whole poem is immediately shrouded in a strong lyrical atmosphere. And the following "White Clouds Never Fly Without Him" further strengthened and expanded that sense of loneliness. There are no fairies, no yellow cranes, only white clouds falling for thousands of years, and the intensity of homesickness is hard to see. Cui Hao's semi-archaic and semi-rhyming seven-character poem has become a wonderful flower in the garden of China's poems.
Then the eyes of appreciation fell on Li Bai's "On the Phoenix Terrace in Nanjing". Phoenix Terrace is a touching masterpiece in the frustrated life of the poet. As an excellent chapter with profound ideology and artistry, it stands out in evergreen poetry forest. Poetry cloud:
There used to be a phoenix on the phoenix platform, and the phoenix went to Taiwan, only Jiangdong returned.
Martial arts flowers were laid on deserted paths, and the number of relatives and friends in the Jin Dynasty has become a famine.
The mountains are shrouded in clouds, such as blue sky, and the river is divided into two.
There is always a traitor in power, like covering the sky, and Chang' an is depressed when he can't see it.
In this poem, Li Bai tearfully described the historical changes of the rise and fall of Jinling (the "Wu Gong" and the "Eastern Jin Dynasty" referred to in the poem), which directly hit the reality that the treacherous officials in Chang 'an, Kyoto were in power at that time, and the evil officials sheltered the sages, and expressed the deep and dignified feelings of a generation of poets who were worried about the country and the monarch, cared about the present and mourned the ancient times, and their unfulfilled wishes and feelings that could not be dismissed. Phoenix Tower has become another immortal poem that is different from and keeps pace with the Yellow Crane Tower.
Faced with such unique, unique, coquettish and wonderful efforts, who has the nerve to divide them into high and low, who is A and who is B? Those who worry about the ranking of "Phoenix Tower" and "Yellow Crane Tower" and talk endlessly think it's time to have a rest.