Bai Juyi's poetic proposition;
Bai Juyi was an extremely important poet in the middle Tang Dynasty. His poetic thoughts and creations, which emphasize popularity and realism, occupy an important position in the history of China's poetry.
In Jiu Shu Tong Yuan, he clearly said: "Servants aim to help the two, and they are independent. Always serve the Tao, and invent poetry. Calling it an allegorical poem is also aimed at helping others; It's not bad to call it leisure poetry. "
It can be seen that among Bai Juyi's four kinds of poems: irony, leisure, sentimentality and miscellaneous law, the first two reflect his "serving the service and always being good", so they are the most valued. His poetic thoughts are mainly embodied in allegorical poems.
(1) shows a tendency to emphasize realism, popularization and fable.
As early as the early Yuan Dynasty, Bai Juyi showed a tendency to emphasize realism, popularity and allegory.
The function of poetry is to punish evil, persuade good and make up current affairs. The means of poetry is praise and criticism, admonition and satire, so he opposes the simple pursuit of "high palace rhythm" and "strange pen" without content, and even more opposes the gorgeous poetic style of "mocking the wind and making flowers and plants" since Qi and Liang Dynasties.
In the Preface to New Yuefu, he clearly pointed out that the standards of poetry writing are "quality and diameter", "straightness and tangency", "core and reality" and "smoothness and smoothness", respectively emphasizing that the language should be easy to understand, the arguments should be straightforward and explicit, the writing should be absolutely true and false, and the form should be smooth and fluent, with the color of ballads.
In other words, poetry must be authentic, easy to understand and easy to sing in order to be considered the ultimate. He consciously learned from folk songs and wrote many poems with folk flavor, such as Yang Liuzhi, which is unpretentious, natural and vivid and full of local flavor, which also reflects the poet's conscious pursuit of popular aesthetics.
This pursuit is similar to his conscious inheritance of the realistic tendency of Du Fu's poems.
Bai Juyi's above requirements for poetry have only one purpose, that is, to make up for current politics. In "Nine Books with the Same Yuan", he reviewed his early creation and said, "At first, I knew that articles were written in time, and songs and poems were written for things." The first thing to do for time is to show it to the king.
He also wrote a lot of allegorical poems reflecting the sufferings of people's livelihood, but the general direction is "only to make people sick and hope the emperor knows" ("Send to Tang Sheng"). Because only when Heaven listens to people's feelings and the emperor is a man can politics become clear.
(2) Lord Zhang Weimin is king.
From emphasizing realism, popularity and allegory to advocating writing for the monarch and the people, Bai Juyi put forward a systematic theory of poetry, and his allegorical poems such as Qin Zhongyin and New Yuefu were created under the guidance of this theory. This theory, with its outstanding realistic pertinence and popularization tendency, makes poetry closer to social reality and even interferes with politics.
This theory is a direct inheritance of Confucian traditional poetics and a further development of Du Fu's creation of current affairs. Judging from writing current events, Bai Juyi and Du Fu are the same; Du Fu only wrote what he saw and felt, and the sufferings of the people were integrated with his own sad feelings. Although he always talks about it in realism, it contains the meaning of fable, but it does not take fable as the starting point.
The difference between Du Fu's poems and Bai Juyi's lies in his thought of "being the king", which highlights the practical utilitarian color of poems and leads them to a narrow road. Because of overemphasis on the satirical function of poetry, many poetic images are replaced by ironic reasoning and discussion, which leads to the lack of poetic images.
Because the standard of poetry evaluation is too narrow, a large number of outstanding writers and works that do not meet this standard in history are excluded. All these have had a certain negative impact on that time and later generations.