Ai Qing left his beloved motherland in a hurry. He still has a lot of poems to write and a lot of poetics to publish. In particular, the thought of "prose beauty", as the main body of his poetry aesthetics, has not been fully expounded, which is deeply regrettable. Because this is Ai Qing's creative discovery in poetry aesthetics, it can be regarded as a breakthrough in Ai Qing's research.
When Ai Qing 1939 was in exile in Guilin, he published the essay "Prose Beauty of Poetry", demanding that poetry should get rid of the fetters of foot rhyme. He said: "We hate that ugly prose in poetry, whether it rhymes or not; We love the beautiful prose in poetry, which often abandons the fetters of rhyme first. " "Any good poem is immortal because of the image it contains, but it will never be immortal because of its good rhyme. "This is not only Ai Qing's explanation and definition of the prose beauty of poetry and how to calculate a good poem from the perspective of poetry aesthetics, but also the decisive reason for the readability and durability of his poems. Some readers don't think deeply and mistakenly think that writing poetry is the beauty of prose as long as it doesn't rhyme. This equates "prose beauty" with "prose culture". As we all know, Ai Qing criticized the prose culture of poetry with its prose beauty. His famous work "Wild Goose River, My Nanny" does not rhyme, but is good at natural rhythm, thus showing a kind of prose beauty. It can be seen that there is no causal relationship between the prose beauty of poetry or prose culture and whether poetry rhymes. The essential difference between the two lies in whether this poem contains an artistic image that readers can't give up.
As early as after the May 4th Movement, there appeared a large number of prosaic phenomena in poems because they didn't rhyme. The reason why the Crescent Poetry School rose was to overcome the prosaic tendency of new poetry at that time. Mr. Ye Shengtao published Dai Wangshu's Rain Lane in the eighth issue of the Novel Monthly 19 in August, 1928, praising it for opening a new era for the syllables of new poetry, because it was a powerful impact on the prose tendency of poetry. However, Dai Wangshu did not continue to write rhyming new poems such as Rain Lane because of Ye Shengtao's admiration. On the contrary, he accepted the influence of French symbolism poetry and wrote a poem "My Memory" which got rid of musical elements in 1929. After 1930, it was publicly announced that new poetry should exclude foreign rhythms and get rid of the early stage completely. His essay on poetry published in Modern Literature Monthly, which was founded in May 1932, can be regarded as his declaration of abolishing rhyme in poetry. By the month of 1936 and 10, he founded the monthly magazine "New Poetry", which further strengthened the idea of replacing the external musical components of poetry with the ups and downs of internal emotions of poetry. Ai Qing claimed to be influenced by my memory and got along well with Dai Wangshu, and tried to avoid musical elements when writing poems. Suddenly formed a poetic style, known as China's modernism. However, he advocated the prose beauty of Guilin's poems after the Anti-Japanese War, and only expressed his personal view of poetry. Although he co-edited an issue of Vertex Poetry Magazine with Dai Wangshu in Guilin, his view on the beauty of prose has nothing to do with the so-called modernism, but because when he presided over the supplement of Nanfang Daily in Guilin, he found that many new poems did not rhyme, like branches of prose, but they were not good prose. Although a little poetic, it is completely "scattered". The rhyming poems in the manuscript are dry in language and stagnant in rhythm. Although some of them are vivid, they are also bound by foot rhyme. He put forward the "prose beauty of poetry" and criticized the prose culture of poetry in view of the bad tendency of new poetry in the early days of the Anti-Japanese War, that is, "if there is no rhyme, it will disperse, and if there is rhyme, it will die". His monograph On Poetry published at that time listed the prose beauty of poetry as a key article. He has always insisted on this idea. At the beginning of liberation, although it was once taken out, it was later earned. Although he stopped singing for 22 years from an unusual spring, some readers think he has given up his idea. In fact, after his "return", he continued to emphasize "the prose beauty of poetry". As he himself said: "It is to get rid of the affectation and flashy atmosphere of poetry and advocate the vivid spoken language used in modern daily life to express the era in which he lives-to give poetry new vitality." This can be regarded as the last and latest explanation of Ai Qing's "prose beauty of poetry" in his later years. He told the China Youth Daily reporter who interviewed him in May, 198 1: "From appreciating rhyme to appreciating blank rhyme is a great progress in poetry aesthetics. Blank poems are more difficult to write, and they must be true. Some poems, without rhyme, are prose, which is not good. Even if a good poem doesn't rhyme, it is expressed by thinking in images. " This further deepens his theory of "prose beauty", which is not a simple language form problem, but a problem of how to deal with poetry content through image thinking. If writing poetry is divorced from thinking in images, whether it rhymes or not, it may become pure prose. He pointed out that the most striking feature of prose in poetry is that the creative process excludes thinking in images. Song of Return, a work in his later years, has a natural rhyme, but it still shows the beauty of prose because it highlights the thinking in images. This shows that Ai Qing's poems consistently adhere to the beauty of prose from morning till night, from blank to rhyme. This is the most prominent and stable personalized feature of Ai Qing's poems in artistic style, which distinguishes him from other poets.
The prose beauty of poetry is the artistic feature of Ai Qing's creation and the aesthetic standard of his poetry theory. Both his creation and poetics attach importance to metaphor. Metaphor can best reflect thinking in images and express artistic images. He likes some Tang poems because of their appropriate metaphors and vivid images. He praised Tang people's poems describing the miserable life of the lower classes. For example, Du Fu's "Three Officials" and "Three Farewells" are touching, even if there is less interest and more detail. He talked many times about the beginning of Shi Qu Guan: "At dusk, you throw yourself into a Shi Qu village, and officials come to arrest people at night. The old man went over the wall and the old woman went out to see it. " What makes an official angry and why do women cry? It describes the sufferings of people in troubled times and points out that Du Fu's Shi Qu Guan is a rhyming prose, but it is not a prose. He believes that some excellent ancient poems, although "putting aside the means of comparison and using straightforward narrative methods to arouse people's sense of reality, also belong to the category of image thinking." His words confirmed that "Fu" can also be used, such as Du Fu's "Northern Expedition", which can be described as "telling the truth of Chen Qi", but there are also similarities. Ai Qing also quoted Chen Ziang's "Youzhou Tower", saying that this poem is "untidy and rhyming, unparalleled, but it can be read through the ages". This is a free poem in the Tang Dynasty. In modern times, Tang's pronunciation may be rhyming. Ai Qing reads in Mandarin, but she can feel the beauty of her rhyming prose and hear the voice of the author's grief and indignation. Ai Qing also praised Bai Juyi's "Flowers Are Not Flowers" for "writing the feeling outside the cloud nine". This is a rhyming free verse with lively language. Although the theme is to express the feelings of tryst between men and women, it is quite elegant.
Ai Qing is full of praise for rhyming or non-rhyming old-style poems. Judging from the tone he uses, he aims to show that old poems, like new poems, should have prose beauty. Although there are many poetic styles at home and abroad, in summary, there are only two types: free verse and metrical verse. There is a difference between rhyming and not rhyming, and there is a difference between prose beauty and prose culture. Therefore, adhering to the beauty of prose and opposing prose culture has become the same task for poets who write new poems and old poems. This requires poets to establish * * * knowledge: first, we should understand that both new poems and old poems are China's poetic style, and we should follow Comrade Mao Zedong's "primary and secondary theory" on new poems and old poems to resolve long-term opposition; Don't compare people who write both new poems and old poems today with bats such as birds and beasts, or frogs who sometimes go into the water and sometimes go ashore, propagate the illogical so-called "amphibious theory" and prolong the opposition between old and new poems. Secondly, we should understand that both new poetry and old poetry have free verse and metrical poetry, and don't oppose free verse and metrical poetry. Ai Qing criticized some people's misunderstanding: the prose defects of new poetry are caused by free poetry, and advocating metrical poetry can avoid the disadvantages of prose. He pointed out: "They only regard prose culture as the irregularity of words and sounds. As long as it is arranged neatly and rhymes, it is not prose culture. ..... There are a lot of metrical poems now, and there is also a tendency to prose. Only in metrical poems, this tendency of prose culture is not easy to be found because of its neat arrangement and foot rhyme as a cover. " What he said was really simple and profound. "Metric poetry is easier to cover up the tendency of prose", which is also the reason why he does not advocate the opposition between free poetry and metrical poetry. Ai Qingqi demands that both new poems and old poems should have prose beauty, because the prose beauty of poems, whether old or new, free or metrical, mainly depends on clear, natural, vivid and lively language, which makes readers feel the charm of "human flavor" (human touch). Ai Qing's own new poems and his favorite new poems and old poems all have vivid and natural prose beauty. However, the beauty of prose is only one of many styles of poetry, which is not easy to master and easy to cause misunderstanding. As Ai Qing said: "Some people write beautiful prose, but they don't know it is poetry;" Some people have written ugly poems, but they don't know that they are the worst prose. " In response to this confusion, he said:
Oral English is beautiful, and it exists in people's daily life. Full of human touch, it makes us feel very cordial. Spoken language is the most prose. The freedom of prose is conducive to the expression of literary images; And that kind of refined prose, lofty prose, healthy or gentle prose is used by poets because they are the most perfect image expression tools.
Ai Qing's words vividly interpreted the prose beauty of poetry. His so-called "prose beauty of poetry" does not require the poet to write prose in poetry, nor does it require the poem to be written like prose, but requires the poem to be written as vivid, natural and cordial as several essays he refers to, and requires the poet to use his so-called prose as an image tool to shape poetry. The beauty of his poetry and prose emphasizes the vivid spoken language used in modern daily life to express the times he lives in, aiming at giving poetry new vitality. Therefore, Ai Qing has always stressed: "The prose beauty of poetry is the beauty of spoken language." The so-called "oral beauty" refers not only to oral vocabulary, but also to the poetic form with oral structure, including the poetic images loaded by the form and the new vitality displayed by poetry. In layman's terms, the beauty of prose advocated by Ai Qing is an overall concept of the unity of content and form, that is, the vivid form with spoken language as a tool contains artistic images that express the spirit of the times. This is actually a poetic aesthetic theory problem that transcends time and space. The old poems of the past and the new poems of today can be impressed by readers for a long time, and generally conform to this aesthetic principle of prose beauty.
Ai Qing appreciates Du Fu's poems, and Du Fu appreciates Li Bai's poems. Although our literary historians divided Du Li into different "doctrines" or schools, they all lived in the late Tang Dynasty during the Anshi Rebellion and had a profound understanding of the people's feelings and the world at that time. Their representative works are branded with the brand of troubled times and linked with the suffering people, so their poems are lively in content and form. Du Fu pointed out: "Bai Ye's poems are invincible, and he thinks in vain." The so-called "gone with the wind" means that poetry is lively, just as new poetry has the beauty of prose. I think it is ok to call the prose beauty of old poems elegant beauty. Try to read Li Bai's Parting at a Hotel in Nanjing. There are many characters in the poem, vivid images and warm scenes. Especially at the end of the poem, "Oh, ask this river flowing eastward, whether it can go further than the love of friends!" " It always reminds people of another poem by Li Bai, "Peach Blossom Pond is deeper than thousands of feet, not as good as Wang Lun." One compares the length and the other compares the depth. The image created by metaphor shows that Li Bai wandered in the southeast, forged a deep friendship with the local people, and exuded the charm of "human touch" that Ai Qing said. Du Like's poem "Two Banks of the Yellow River Recovered by the Imperial Army", which is easy to understand and quick to talk, was rated as the "first quick poem" of Du Fu's life. Especially at the end of the sentence, "come back from this mountain, pass another mountain, come up from the south, and then go north-to my own town!" " The psychological speed is as fast as God's help, which makes people sigh as "inspection", surpassing Li Bai's elegance. Historians have always believed that Du Li's "ism is different": one is romanticism and the other is realism; "Different styles": one is elegant and the other is depressed. However, if Ai Qing's aesthetic standards are adopted, the traditional views may not be completely realistic. Du Li, two great poets, did not use classical poetry, which was close to the spoken language of Tang Dynasty. In terms of content, most of them write about the sufferings brought to the people (including the poet himself) by the An Shi Rebellion. In terms of aesthetic taste, it is loved by ancient and modern readers. The elegance of their poems is actually equivalent to the beauty of prose.
Today, when new poetry is criticized and traditional poetry is difficult to innovate and develop, Ai Qing's aesthetic theory of "Prose Beauty of Poetry" can enlighten poets who create new and old poems to varying degrees: more use of modern spoken language, more display of contemporary "human flavor", more shaping of the heroic image of modern builders in Socialism with Chinese characteristics, so that people can read it with relish. In a word, "the prose beauty of poetry" is not exclusive, it is suitable for poets of all artistic styles and times, and is conducive to the writing, appreciation and evaluation of new and old poems.