Wang Li's Poetic Metrics

Since the prosperity of modern poetry in the Tang Dynasty, writing poetry has become the basic skill of China scholars, who have been training their skills since they entered school. The rules of modern poetry are passed down from generation to generation through oral and oral communication. In the past, scholars did not have the question of whether they could write poems, but only whether they could write well. Therefore, in ancient times, there was no systematic exposition of poetic methods. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the imperial examination was abolished. At the end of the Republic of China, schools were promoted and new school education was transformed, so students became more and more unfamiliar with poetry. This dynasty won the world at once, and paid no attention to culture and education, let alone traditional culture. By the year of the Cultural Revolution, culture was almost in a state of disintegration. Although many people admire the Tang and Song poems handed down from ancient times, they are not very clear about the laws of poetry. Professor Wang Li wrote The Laws of China's Poetry in his early years, aiming at establishing the poetic law system of China's poetry. Since Ding Ge, books such as Poetic Metres and Ten Lectures on Poetic Metres have been published one after another, which have played an important role in popularizing poetic metrics. The latter two popular pamphlets are even more popular all over the world. This has played a great role in preventing people from writing old poems that can't speak melody. This credit should be affirmed. However, extremes must be reversed, and there are advantages and disadvantages. The popularity of "poetic meter" has shown its negative influence so far, resulting in the abuse of metrical meter. Although this can't be entirely attributed to Professor Wang Li, some defects in Professor Wang Li's poetic system do have a certain relationship with this abuse. Professor Wang Li is a linguist. He mainly studies the laws of China's poems from the perspective of language. Professor Wang seldom touches on the literary tradition of China's poetry. This kind of research is inherently one-sided. Because poetry is never a theoretical problem, but a practical one. Without the practice of poets, it is difficult to simply summarize the so-called laws of poetry. One of the characteristics of Wang Li's poetic meter is that all genres are equal. No matter five words, seven words, quatrains and metrical poems, they all come from the same formula. The so-called law sentence is actually a sentence with harmonious voice summed up by the poet in his long-term creative practice. So it can't be a unified formulation. For example, an equally common format of "flat and uniform" is "flat and uniform". These two sentences have the same effect. They are all sentences summed up by the poet's long-term practice. However, the latter sentence was classified as an "awkward sentence" by Wang Li because it did not conform to Wang's formula, which was interpreted as the third word and saved by the fourth word. Obviously, this can only be regarded as speculation. Wang Li's theory can't reasonably explain the difference between five-character quatrains and seven-character quatrains. Because that can only be understood from the development of quatrains in the history of literature. For another example, quatrains are more flexible than metrical poems. That is to say, for antithesis, for metrical poetry, it is a metrical pattern, and for quatrains, it is just a rhetorical device. Moreover, even lines and quatrains are far more flexible than metrical poems, and there are many rhyming quatrains than metrical poems. However, Wang Li actually classified quatrains as archaic. In fact, all previous dynasties called metrical poems and quatrains modern poems. In order to form a complete poetic system, Wang Li stifled the diversified elements of poetic method. Wang Li denied all poems that did not conform to Wang's formula. He denied it because the rules were not strict and the rules were not finalized. Wang Li did not read a lot of ancient poems in his study of poetic methods, but relied on the exposition of Qing people. Generally, the ancients in China did not make a thorough and systematic study on this kind of problem, and only kept a few words, which was very one-sided. Only by reading a lot and deeply understanding the practices of the ancients can we overcome this one-sidedness, but Wang Li did not do this basic work well. For example, Wang Li said that there was "no isolated case" in the Tang Dynasty's regular poems, and later changed his mind to say that only two were found, one of which was crooked (one arm hung with two horns), but in fact there was only one (centenarians did not farm), but it was not a regular poem. In fact, there are many lonely examples in the rhyme of Tang poetry. For example, Du Fu's Morning Dew and Liu Changqing's The Return of the Five Mausoleums are all examples. This shows that Wang Li did not read the whole Tang poetry carefully. Wang Li regards all sentences that do not conform to his formula as extra-legal. But in fact, the meter of modern poetry is far less rigid than that stipulated by Wang Li. For example, "an old friend stayed in the Yellow Crane Tower in the west" and "The clouds in Baidicheng came out, and it rained and turned over the basin." "The big city is green and the Dongtai West Station is sunny." In Wang Li's view, such a sentence is "divorced from the law". This is the mechanist's point of view, which does not conform to the judgments of metrical poems in previous dynasties. Wang Li has a magic weapon. He explained all the evidence against him with the fact that the law poem was not finalized at that time. For example, there have been many famous poems since the Tang Dynasty. How can it be because the style of poetry has not been finalized? Another example is Cui Hao's poem The Yellow Crane Tower, which was rated as "the first of the seven laws of the Tang Dynasty" by later generations, but it did not conform to Wang Li's poetic method. Wang Li's explanation was uncertain at that time. I don't know when it was rhymed. Has Professor Wang Li verified it? Cui Hao was a poet in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. Many of his metrical poems completely use metrical sentences, but none of them have won the reputation of this poem. In an era when metrical poems have become the content of imperial examinations, it is a strange thing that metrical poems have not yet been finalized. Is this convincing? Du Fu is a representative writer of rhythmic poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, but many of them are out of tune, "out of tune" (according to Wang Li's poetic law). Wang Li still claims that this is because the meter in the early Tang Dynasty was not strict. Then, some modern poems lost their adhesion in the Song Dynasty. Was it not finalized in the Song Dynasty? Wang Li inherited Zhao Zhixin's statement: "Flat and flat, the next sentence is flat and flat, and metrical poems are often used;" If it is flat, it is flat. There are three rows under the cover and the top must be flat. "In fact, straightforward sentences are not uncommon. There are 3 cases of 80 five-character poems in 300 Tang Poems. The "I have heard about Dongting Lake for a long time" in Du Fu's masterpiece "The Story of Climbing Yueyang Tower" was described by Wang Li as an "exception", which is illegal. However, among the 80 five laws in 300 Tang Poems, five actually use the sentence pattern of "occasionally". There are so many exceptions, can you still call them exceptions? As we all know, it was selected as a famous article in private school textbooks, and it is actually a law poem. So how do teachers teach and students learn poetry? The three famous buildings in China are all famous for their poems in the Tang Dynasty. Wang Tengting is famous for Wang Bo's Preface to Wang Tengting, Yellow Crane Tower is famous for Cui Hao's Poems of Yellow Crane Tower, and Yueyang Tower is famous for Meng Haoran's and Du Fu's poems. These three most famous metrical poems are all "exceptions" (or "pseudo" metrical poems in the eyes of modern people) that do not conform to the laws of Wang Li's poems. Is it just a coincidence? The disadvantages of this formulaic poetic method have indeed caused great harm at present. Some lovers of classical poetry have developed the habit of recognizing only the flat-leveled words but not the poems. They regard the flat-leveled words as the expression of learning and the flat-leveled words as the poems themselves. This theory has also caused many people to be deaf. They judge whether a sentence sounds harmonious or not based on Wang Li's "horizontal spectrum" rather than their own hearing. A typical example is that, last year, talented people in Bashu criticized Zhao Zhongxiang's regular poems as "pseudo-regular poems", saying that the Pingping Rebellion was a pseudo-regular poem and a pseudo-quatrain (Mr. Wei didn't even want the distinction between ancient and unique laws), and it is still published in the regular media. In a word, Wang Li's poems and their popularity have both positive and negative aspects. We can regard poetic meter as baby walker, and we can put it on the shelf after learning to walk, instead of regarding it as the golden rule. If you want to master the rhythm of poetry, you have to read more and think more about famous works, and constantly sum up and improve them in practice.