What is beauty in image?

"Image" is an important concept in China's ancient literary theory. The ancients believed that meaning was an internal abstract mind, just like an external concrete object; Meaning originates from the heart and is expressed through images, which are actually the sustenance of meaning. In fact, China's traditional poetics refers to the artistic techniques of expressing feelings in scenery, borrowing scenery to express feelings and blending scenes. The process of poetry creation is a process of observation, feeling and image, which usually refers to natural images, that is, objects taken from nature and entrusted with their feelings. Knowing the plot and historical facts of life is also used to pin feelings, which is also an image. That is, the social image relative to the object image and the natural image. It is a term used in the analysis of poetry and prose, which refers to everything that constitutes artistic conception. This kind of thing often carries the author's subjective feelings, and these images combine to form an artistic conception. For example, in Ma Zhiyuan's "Qiu Si", in the sentence "The old vine is a faint crow and the small bridge is a flowing water family", the dead vine, the old tree, the faint crow, the small bridge, the flowing water and the family are all images in the poem. When these images are combined together, they become a sad and sad artistic conception. Image is concrete, artistic conception is the combination of the overall environment and feelings composed of concrete things, and feelings are pinned on the scenery. China's poetics has always attached importance to the relationship between "meaning" and "image", namely, the relationship between "emotion" and "scene", the relationship between "mind" and "object", and the relationship between "spirit" and "form". There is a lot of discussion in this regard. For example, as Liu Xie pointed out, the idea of poetry lies in "wandering between gods and things"; Xie Zhen said that "scenery is the medium of poetry"; Wang Fuzhi said: "If you can get your heart from the scenery and your spirit from the body, you will have your own well-informed words and participate in the wonders of chemical industry." Until Wang Guowei said that "all landscape words are sentimental words". Empathy for scenery, intention for things, focus on form and implication for images are actually just different manifestations of poetic images in China's traditional poetics. As hieroglyphics, Chinese characters come from primitive hieroglyphics, such as sun, moon, water, fire, mountains, Sichuan, horses and cattle. Compared with western phonetic symbols, Chinese characters have a natural connection with poetic images, and some people even put forward "word thinking" on this basis. However, Chinese characters, as hieroglyphics, have been gradually abstracted in the long-term evolution. Among the six ways of word formation: referring to things, pictographic characters, pictophonetic characters, cognition, diversion and excuses, the proportion of pictographic characters is getting smaller and smaller. Modern Chinese characters have become a set of pure semantic symbols. Therefore, the image expression of poetry mainly depends on the text of the object, not on the image of the text itself. Nevertheless, the remaining pictographic features of Chinese characters contribute to the image expression of poetry. Pound (1885- 1972), an American poet who praised China's classical poetry, once lamented: "Chinese composed of hieroglyphs is always poetic, and it cannot but be poetic. On the contrary, a large line of English words is not easy to become poetry. " [Edit this paragraph] The difference between image and artistic conception Image and artistic conception are two important concepts in poetry appreciation, but their meanings are often confused by many people. Modern Chinese Dictionary makes no distinction between this and simply interprets "image" as "artistic conception". Correctly defining its meaning and relationship is of positive significance to poetry reading and writing. Mr. Tong Qingbing, a master of literary theory, defined them as follows in the book "A Course of Literary Theory": Artistic conception is the realm and mood expressed by literary works through image description, and it is also the aesthetic imagination space of the image of scene blending and virtual reality in lyric works and its induction and development. Image is a typical art, which aims at expressing philosophical thoughts, takes symbolism or absurdity as its basic characteristics, and achieves the ideal state of human beings. According to this definition, we can draw the following points: First, image is a typical image to express meaning, a subjective image, and it is perceptual and concrete; Artistic conception is a kind of realm and artistic conception, which is expressed or induced by images and needs to be understood and abstracted. Secondly, images or the combination of images constitute artistic conception, and images are the means or ways to constitute artistic conception. It takes imagination to grasp both correctly. There are two main situations in which images constitute artistic conception: first, images constitute artistic conception. For example, Wang Mian's Mo Mei: "The trees near my home in Xiyan Lake are covered with faint ink marks. Don't praise the good color, just leave the air full of dried Kun. " There is only one image in the poem-Mo Mei. But this plum is not the plum in nature, but the plum in the author's heart, a plum with ink color and personality. After careful tasting, we can feel that there is an artistic realm in the poem, which is unrestrained, maverick and comfortable. This realm is formed through this plum tree, which is the unique artistic conception of this poem. Generally speaking, most poems describing objects are like this. Secondly, the combination of images forms artistic conception, that is, multiple images form a picture of life and form a whole artistic conception. For example, Li Bai's "Farewell to Meng Haoran on the way to Yangzhou": "The old friend stayed in the Yellow Crane Tower in the west, and the fireworks went down to Yangzhou in March. Lonely sails overlook the blue sky, but I can see the Yangtze River flowing in the sky. " This poem is composed of a series of individual images-Yellow Crane Tower, fireworks, solitary sails, the Yangtze River and so on. -and it has become a realistic picture, with feelings hidden in the scenery. Although it is not lyrical, it shows more profound feelings in the scenery. The poem does not directly express the attachment to friends, but the image of a poet who disappears through a lonely sail. The river is long and he loses something by the river. On the surface, this poem is about scenery, but actually every sentence is lyrical, which arouses readers' endless aesthetic imagination and forms a meaningful artistic conception of this poem. From the above two examples, we can find that images are inseparable from artistic conception. Without the artistic conception of the whole poem, "Mei" has lost its unique meaning in the poem, and "Lonely Sail" has nothing to do with leaving feelings as soon as possible. Of course, not all image combinations can constitute artistic conception. For example, Bai Pu's "Qiu Si" says: "The sunset in the lonely village, the old trees in the west of Western jackdaw smoke, and a little flying gull shadow. Green mountains and green waters, white grass, green leaves and yellow flowers.