XU Xueyi’s Discrimination on Style of Tang Poetry and Its Historic Significance in Chinese Poetics

XU Xueyi’s discrimination of style of Tang poetry contains two layers of meaning: one is structure, the other is style. The former is concerned with poetic regulations including meters and forms; the latter is concerned with the stylistic features of the poem and connected with the artistic connotation and spiritual tendency. These two represent the priority and essence of poetic composition, that is, to begin with the form of poetry and then to present the original characteristics of the style. Based on the discrimination, XU describes the transformation of Tang poetry, making clear the transformational clue of poetic development by defining the root and flower and essence and change of it. As an effort to set up an aesthetic example, Xu tries to defend the real position of the poems created in the periods of Han Wei and ShengTang , and he also admits the rationalization of the transformation.