Poetry should be tangible, but it can't be said.
Like a round fruit,
Silent,
It's like a thumb stroking an old medal,
Silence, like a stone fence on the windowsill,
Smoothed by sleeves, covered with moss—
Poetry should be silent.
Fly like a bird.
Poetry should be motionless at first glance.
As if the moon had climbed into the sky,
Fly away as if the moon had been untied.
Trees entwine the night.
Fly away, like the bright moon behind the leaves on a winter night.
Put aside one memory after another—
Poetry should be motionless at first glance.
As if the moon had climbed into the sky.
Poetry should really be equal to:
Not just real.
Not a sad history
It was an empty doorway with a red maple leaf.
Instead of love,
It's the grass, the sun, the moon and the sea-
Poetry should not have hidden meaning,
It should be direct.
(translated by Zhao Yiheng)
In the history of Chinese and foreign poetry, although there are many works on poetry, there are few works that can be called "poetry". Because lyric and reasoning are two different ways of thinking for human beings to grasp the world, poetry is the main emotion and poetry is the main reason. Therefore, to express the principle of poetry with lyric poetry, we must turn rationality into emotion and embody rationality with emotion. If a poet does not have a profound and clear understanding of the art of poetry, he will often get twice the result with half the effort, and even cause people to misunderstand poetry. Xu's Poetic Art is the representative work of this type.
The whole poem is divided into three parts, and each part artistically discusses some artistic features of the poem, especially the imagist poetry advocated by the poet. In the first part, the poet discusses the metaphysical temperament of poetry. In the poet's view, although poetry depends on reality, it does not stick to reality and should get rid of the shackles of reality as much as possible. Poetry is different from prose literature. It is not a description of reality, but a singing of reality. It is a wave of reality in the poet's mind, and the content of poetry is feelings and thoughts. "Poetry should be tangible and unspeakable", which shows the unique relationship between poetry and reality. As China's ancient poetics said, poetry is not "cooked for rice" but the reality of "brewed for wine". If poetry is not detached from the reality of the earth like a bird, then it can only crawl on the earth forever and cannot take off. In the second part, the poet discusses the implicit beauty of poetry. Poetry expresses feelings for "straightness" and "dew". It is not a copy of reality, but a spiritual and emotional reality-poetry is a spiritual reality. However, feelings are abstract, so poets often send their feelings to other things, which is often another form of poets-poetic form. The poet's feelings are deeply hidden behind literary symbols. For readers, every poem is a fixed aesthetic object, but because of the different appreciators, everyone will have a different poem in his heart-his own poem recreated by the appreciator. Implication brings the richness and philosophical universality of poetry. The third part discusses the special skill of image poetry-image technique. Imagist poets express their emotions through images, which is different from figures of speech such as metaphor, symbol and imitation. The images they show are the poet's feelings and another state of existence. "Poetry should not imply anything, but should be direct", which reproduces the general tendency of American modernist poetry, especially imagist poetry, to pay attention to the concreteness of things, becomes a classic of modernism and is repeatedly quoted by people.
The Art of Poetry is an artistic summary of the poet's creative practice, which embodies Xu's poetic thoughts. The concrete application of these techniques has resulted in the overall characteristics of American modernist poetry: great intensity, profound thoughts and prominent contradictions. Compared with traditional poetry, these techniques show greater flexibility of poetry. If we make a comparative study of the art of poetry and the three manifestos of Imagism, we will have a deeper understanding of its significance and grasp the artistic characteristics of modern American poetry. The main idea of the two is the same, but Mackley allows it to be expressed in vivid poetic form. In the art of poetry, vivid images and strong speculative colors set each other off, forming a vivid and broad artistic realm. On the one hand, it reflects the poet's love for the art of poetry, on the other hand, it shows the poet's profound poetic accomplishment. (Jiang) According to