Why are they respectively praised as "talents" and "ghostly talents"? The two Tang Dynasty poets who did not appear in "Three Thousand Miles in Chang'an", Bai Juyi | Poets | Two
This summer, the animated film "Three Thousand Miles in Chang'an" sparked a strong interest in Tang Dynasty poetry and poets. Among the top poets of the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Bai Juyi each possessed the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, and were respectively praised as geniuses, earthly talents, and talented individuals; Li He, a poet from the Middle Tang Dynasty, was known as a "genius" due to his mysterious and stunning poetic style, which opened up another way of writing. The works of the four talents of heaven, earth, human beings, and ghosts generally represent the mainstream style of Tang poetry, creating a brilliant halo of Tang poetry.
As the most dazzling twin stars in the poetry world of the prosperous Tang Dynasty, Li Bai and Du Fu have always attracted descendants to bow down and learn since the middle Tang Dynasty. Among numerous learners, Li He and Bai Juyi are outstanding.
"Li He: The pen has been used to nourish the heavens without merit."
Li He inherited Li Bai's unique imagination and elegant style, allowing the romantic atmosphere to continue and extend; Bai Juyi further expanded the realistic spirit of Du Fu's new theme of Yuefu, with the aim of "combining poetry with work", and focused his vision and care on the difficulties of people's livelihood after the Middle Tang Dynasty.
Li He was originally a descendant of the royal family, but his family was already in a state of decline when he was born. Not only that, but also because his father's name "Jin Su" sounds the same as "Jin" and "Jin", he was unable to take the imperial examination. This heavy blow caused his poetry, although originating from Li Bai, to have a completely different appearance: one wild and one arrogant, one extroverted and one introverted.
Since the path of the imperial examination was not feasible, Li He had no choice but to seek another path and write poetry. Back then, Li Bai, relying on his brilliant talent in poetry, was recommended by He Zhizhang and walked into the Daming Palace with his head held high. He exclaimed, "If we laugh and go out, are we not the people of Penghao?"
However, the path of poetry is not smooth either. Li He often brought his bookboy and rode a thin and weak donkey with a tattered brocade bag on his back, struggling to search and recite poetry in the gentle wind and rain, by the desolate mountains and ancient temples, and under the shade of village trees. Whenever you encounter something, immediately write it into zero sentences and put it into your bag. When I returned home in the evening, my mother saw a pile of poems and couldn't help but sigh: This is something that only stops when I vomit my heart out! It can be said that Li He is using his life to create.
As a "genius", Li Bai's elegance and unrestrained style are the norm, and when he is in high spirits, he helps his writing to succeed. This also brings about an undeniable flaw, which is that poetry often has repetition. The great scholar of the Ming Dynasty, Wang Shizhen, criticized the poetry of Tai Bai: "Before ten poems, it was difficult to enter Shaoling; after a hundred poems, Qinglian was more easily disliked."
This kind of "similarity writing" is particularly prominent in Li Bai's farewell poems, which often shows that the last sentence expresses his yearning with water. For example, "the lone sail is far away from the blue sky, and only the Yangtze River flows across the sky", "the cloud sails cannot see each other from afar, and the Yangtze River flows in the sky at dusk", "feeling and running water, but there is everlasting longing for each other", "if the Yellow River is continuous, the white head everlasting longing for each other", and the meaning is similar.
In contrast, Li He can be regarded as a representative of the bitter chanting type of "vomiting out the heart is already heard". Even a casual sentence and a word need to be pondered over, how can one follow the same pattern on their own? He opened up another style of poetry with his own dedication, which is "the words are strange and eerie, and the gains are all astonishing.".
For example, throughout the history of poetry and literature describing ghosts and gods, such as "Long chanting on the side of Mount Tai", "The sound of rain and rain chirping", "Often ghosts cry, but when the sky is cloudy, they smell", all of them are a single mode of ghost crying. Li He, on the other hand, with his brilliant talent and continuous hard work, has carved out a new poetic style and interest at the peak of his predecessors——
From an emotional perspective, his depictions of ghosts, snakes, and gods are all inner projections infused with a wealth of emotional experiences; In terms of skills, he skillfully adds bright colors to visual decoration, personalizes crying to auditory embellishments, and seamlessly connects with rhetorical techniques such as synesthesia and personification to create a series of cathode, cold, and eerie ghost and god illusions.
For example, "Remembering the Lord with clear tears like lead water" and "If there is love in heaven, it is also old" endow merciless things with infinite affection: the copper immortal shed tears, and the sky changed its appearance, which is indeed "unparalleled in ancient and modern times".
For example, "the stone veins, water, and springs drip sand, and the ghost lamps are like painted pine flowers." Various desolate phenomena such as crevices, secluded springs, ghost fires, and pine flowers are combined in a mysterious way, creating a dense and ghostly atmosphere that leaps onto the paper.
For example, "You Lan Lu, like crying eyes" and "Cold Cui Zhu, laborious radiance", as if seeing Lan Lu's crying marks and green candles, cold and serene. The difference is that there is a slight warmth in the gloomy atmosphere, lamenting the lack of beauty, and feeling sad about not meeting oneself.
"The pen nourishes the heavens without any merit." Li He used his unique "immortal talent, ghost language, skillful hands, and spiritual heart" to create numerous illusory and absurd images like "whales, turtles, ghosts, snakes, and gods", which amazed countless readers from ancient and modern times.
"Bai Juyi: Writing a" Poetic History "of a Dynasty"
Unlike Li He's infatuation with the depiction of ghosts and gods, Bai Juyi adheres to the principle of "reaching both ends and helping the world", paying more attention to the suffering of people's livelihoods in the world.
In the 16th year of the Zhenyuan reign, at the age of 28, Bai Juyi passed the imperial examination. In an era where the saying goes, "Thirty old classics, fifty young scholars", this is naturally extraordinary. In the 18th year of the Zhenyuan reign, he also took the imperial examination for the Ministry of Personnel's outstanding talents and was admitted to the top class, even more so.
After entering the imperial examination three times, the young Bai Juyi amazed the world with a song called "Song of Everlasting Sorrow". The poet recounts the loneliness and sorrow of "beauty beyond reason, cold blankets unattainable.". But during this period, the love between children and children was not the true nature of Bai Juyi. After serving as a middle-level Hanlin Bachelor and Left Scholar, he began his practice and efforts of "aiming for both prosperity and prosperity". Through a large number of newly created music pieces, he wrote the "poetry history" of the Xianzong dynasty.
In his preface to the New Yuefu Poetry, Bai Juyi loudly called for poetry to be "written for the emperor, for the subjects, for the people, for things, and for things, not for literature.". He plunged his sharp pen into the darkness of reality and actively endorsed the lower class of the people——
Because of mourning for the plight of the farmers, he issued a complaint against "stripping the silk from my body and taking the millet from my mouth"; When he saw that "it was a drought in the south of the Yangtze River at the age of, and people in Quzhou ate people", he dared to accuse the eunuch in power of "arrogance and arrogance are all over the road, and Pommeled Horse shines on the dust"; Even when wearing cotton clothes and enjoying "warmth and stability", one still possesses the broad sentiment of "settling for thousands of miles of fur" and "no one in the world is cold".
On the point of "worrying about Li Yuan in poverty", Bai Juyi and Du Fu are highly consistent. Bai Juyi not only promoted the realism spirit of Du Fu's poetry, but also deliberately imitated the artistic structure and syntax.
Let's take a look at the "Sisters" series of "Soldiers and Vehicles" and "Xinfeng Folding Arms Weng": when describing the scene of bidding farewell, Du Fu said "holding clothes and stopping feet to stop crying, crying straight up to the clouds", while Bai Juyi said "the cries in the south and north of the village are mournful, and the children, parents, husbands, and wives are gone.". The difference is the farewell procession, the same is the mournful cries echoing between heaven and earth.
The act of using poetry to "supplement current politics and vent human emotions" can make the powerful change color, the ruling power tighten their wrists, and the military leaders grit their teeth. Soon, Bai Juyi was demoted to Jiangzhou. On the banks of the Xunyang River, the poet left behind the timeless masterpiece "Pipa Xing", expressing his nostalgia for "being a fallen person from the ends of the earth, why did we ever meet?".
From then on, Bai Juyi's ideology shifted from "reaching the goal of benefiting the world" to "being poor and self-centered". In his later years, he settled in his heart to release Buddhism and wandered through the old village. He no longer persisted in temple battles and his own honor and disgrace, but increasingly pursued self adaptation and transcendence.
