On Jiang Kui’s Influence on Yan Yu’s Poetry Ideas

Jiang Kui, a renowned literati in the Southen Song Dynasty, is the forerunner of Jianghu Poetry School. His thought on poetry exerted a great influence on the development of poetry in the following eras, and in particular, on the inspiration of Yan Yu’s poetry idea, who is a well-known poetry critic, who belongs to a later generation. There exist similarities between Yan’s ingenious remarks in his Zen poems and Jiang’s relizations. Both of them sought to achieve highly naturalized artistic effects. Jiang argued that poetry should reflect emotion and be natural, and Yan considered that poetry ought to express poet’s inner feelings Another point that they both mentioned in books was Qixiang. They both took poetry as an organic life, even though there was a slight difference in their analysis of Qixiang. Yan’s idea on poetry followed the same train of thought of Jiang’s.