Idyll and Frontier Fortress Poem of Tang at Its Height

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During the flourishing period of the Tang dynasty, poetry also enjoyed a situation of letting hundred flowers bloom. Besides Li Bai and Du Fu, there were poets like Meng Haoran and Wang Wei who were the representatives of idy1l, and Cen Shen and Gao Shi who were the representative of frontier fortress poems.

Meng Haoran (689-740) lived his life in the contradiction between the accession into and retreat from official career. His landscape poems portray the beautiful scenery and implied his sadness and bitterness in being unrecognized in talents. Most of his poems are set in an isolate, desolate and objective circumstance. As a representative of landscape poems, Meng Haoran is best known for his five-character poem A Spring Morning and his five-character regulated verse Stopping at a Friend’s Farm-house.

Wang Wei(?-761), courtesy name(zi) Mo Jie. Wang spent all his life a relatively smooth official career and was unique among his peer poets. His early writing is generous in poetic imagination and vast in artistic conception and carries a trait of being bold, unstrained, and frank and upright, which means that he was high-spirited, strenuous and enterprising in his early life. His later writing is influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, endowing his writings about pastoral life a gradually peaceful style and imagination. Because he was the earliest Chinese ink painter, the conception of rivers and mountains is conveyed in pictures, especially the static beauty captured in objective items. Therefore, his aesthetic value over natural landscape mostly started from fine arts. For example, his typicalworks Deer Enclosure is filled with mysterious beauty, demonstrating a conservative and quiet attitude of poets and carrying an obvious mark of Buddhism and Taoism.

The pastoral poems by Wang Wei and Meng Haoran all leak their thoughts of retreating into hermit life while maintaining a high spirit. The poems by Meng reveal more a pursuit of official career than his counterpart whose poems are more inclined to seek hermit life. Meng tried to pursue an official career while Wangfound it impossible to treat into a hermit life. However, both of their landscape poems integrate the beauty of Tao Yuanming’s and Xie Lingyun’s poems, rendering their poems a naturalness and maturity instead of the opposite.

The flourishing Tang also witnessed a great development in frontier fortress poems represented by Cen Shen and Gao Shi.

Cen Shen(about 715-770) was a romantic poet. His poems are vigorous in momentum, lavish in imagination, enthusiastic in mood, and mythical in art, which was largely due to his characters of being curiosity. In his poems, the most fundamental characteristic is the heroic patriotism and fearless optimism. He often portrayed the peculiar fortress landscape but rarely the life in frontiers.

Unlike Cen Shen, Gao Shi(about 702-765) gave a vivid description of the fortress life, which symbolized his most outstanding achievement. Among many other fortress poets, Wang Changling, Li Chi and Wang Zhihuan are very famous. Wang Changling was the most accomplished one and is well-known as grand master of seven-character poem. His most famous work is Joining the Army, which is a highly success in art value. The essential part of it even influenced the poetic works of later generations.