COMMENTS ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE IDEAL OF "LEARNING THAT IS POETRY

Poets of generations before the Song Dynasty had attached great importance to learning. It was, however, in the Song Dynasty that the fashion of that is poetrywas formed, the source of which can be dated back to Dufu, a famous poet in the Tang Dynasty. Dufu began with inditing the poems interspersed with his argumentation, thus breaking with the traditional aesthetic system of the Chinese and becoming the first to pay close attention to learning and literary quotations as well as the rhyme of the individual Chinese characters and phrases. Two poets that were indebted to Du and his were Han Yu and Li Shangyin, whose creative works and theory of had exerted a direct influence on the shaping of the ideal of that is poetry. Enhanced by the efforts of the Xikun school, whose was grounded on the literary allusions,of Ouyangxiu, who sought to improve his from the ancients, and of Wang Anshi, whose was composed out of the historical materials, the ideal of that is poetry gradually culminated in maturity when it was taken over by Sushi and Huang Tingjian. The latter's contribution to this ideal particularly deserves to be mentioned . It is no exaggeration to say that, thanks to Huang Tingjian's theory on poetics, the ideal of that is poetry ascended upward from a pure poetic technique to a theoretical height of creation.