The New Yuefu Movement was a poetry innovation movement in the mid-Tang Dynasty. It emerged in the Zhenyuan and Yuanhe years, with Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen as its main advocates. The rise of the New Yuefu Movement had profound social reasons. After the Anshi Rebellion, the Tang Dynasty's national fortunes declined and various conflicts intensified. Some people with lofty ideals who care about the national destiny diligently pay attention to real politics and hope that the country can prosper again. Therefore, they gave up the idealism of the prosperous Tang Dynasty and moved toward realism. The New Yuefu Movement came into being to reflect real life, pay attention to people's livelihood, and emphasize the social function of literature.
The New Yuefu Movement arose on the basis of the long-standing tradition of realist poetry. It inherited the realist tradition of the Book of Songs and the Yuefu of the Han and Wei dynasties, and drew more recently from Du Fu, Yuan Jie, and Gu Kuang. The spirit of realism in poetry. New Yuefu is a kind of Yuefu poem that uses new inscriptions to describe current events. But more importantly, it was the unique theoretical pursuit and creative practice of this group of writers that made it a poetry innovation movement in the poetry world of the Mid-Tang Dynasty.
During the Zhenyuan and Yuanhe periods of the Tang Dynasty, most scholar-bureaucrats demanded political innovation in order to revive the rule of the Tang Dynasty. Driven by this wave, poets such as Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen advocated the restoration of the ancient system of collecting poems, carrying forward the tradition of allegorizing current events in the Book of Songs and the Yuefu of the Han and Wei dynasties, so that poetry could serve as a "complementary review of current affairs" and a "disclosure of human feelings". role. Bai Juyi pointed out in "Yu Yuan Jiu Shu": "Articles are written according to the time, and songs and poems are written according to the event." ?In the "Preface to New Yuefu", the creation principles of New Yuefu poetry are comprehensively put forward, requiring that the diction should be simple and easy to understand for readers; the words should be straightforward, relevant to the current situation, and make the listeners take warning; the narrative should be well-founded and convincing. ; The words and sentences must also be smooth and consistent with the rhythm, so that you can enjoy the music. He declared that he would do it for the king, his ministers, his people, things, and things, not for literature.
Poets such as Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen either imitated ancient inscriptions or imitated Du Fu's famous poems, using the style of ancient Yuefu poems to improve popular folk songs at the time and actively engage in the creation of new Yuefu poems. . Bai Juyi's fifty "New Yuefu" poems and ten "Qin Zhongyin" poems, Yuan Zhen's "Tianjia Ci", "Zhi Fu Ci", and "He Li Xiaoshu's Twelve New Yuefu Poems" are their representative works. Zhang Ji's thirty-three Yuefu poems, as well as poems such as "Ye Lao Ge", "City Building Ci", and "Jia Ke Le" reflect the suffering caused by the war to the people and expose the cruel exploitation and enslavement of the people by the rulers. . Wang Jian described the tragic life of the post boat trackers in "The Ballad of Shui Fu". "Tian Jia Xing" and "Cultivation of Silkworms" reveal the cruelty of feudal taxes and servitude. Li Shen once composed twenty Yuefu poems with new titles, but unfortunately they no longer exist. Two of his poems "Compassion for Farmers": Plant one grain of millet in spring and harvest ten thousand grains in autumn. There is no idle land all over the world, and farmers are still starving to death. ?It’s noon on the day of hoeing, and the sweat is dripping from the soil. Who knew that every grain of food on the plate is laborious? has become a famous poem that has been recited through the ages.
The spirit of the New Yuefu Movement was inherited by the late Tang poets Pi Rixiu, Nie Yizhong and Du Xunhe. Pi Rixiu's "Ten Poems of Zhengyuefu" and "Three Shame Poems", Nie Yizhong's "The Young Master's Journey", and Du Xunhe's "The Widow in the Mountains" and "The Old Man in the Village After the Rebellion" profoundly reveal the rule of the late Tang Dynasty. The brutality and corruption of the rebels and the social reality before and after the Peasant War in the late Tang Dynasty.