Works review
Yang Wanli (1 127 ~ 1206), whose real name is Ting Xiu and Cheng Zhai, is a native of Jishui, and has Cheng Zhai Ji. You Mao, Yang Wanli, Fan Chengda and Lu You are four friends who admire each other. Yang's reputation is particularly great, just like Li Bai and Du Fu in Tang poetry. However, ten fingers have their own length, and two equally famous writers at the same time are like Li Bai and Du Fu. Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi will always tell each other slowly. After the Song Dynasty, Yang Wanli's readers were not only far less than Lu You, but also less than Fan Chengda. During this period, Yang Wanli was the pivot of poetry transformation, creating a fresh and pungent style of writing, which made Lu and Fan's style conservative or steady. Therefore, in the poetic style of Yan Yu's Cang Lang Shi Hua, only Yang Chengzhai's poetic style is mentioned, and Lu Fangweng's poetic style or Fan Shihu's poetic style is not mentioned.
Yang Wanli's creative experience can be found in the preface of Jianghu Ji and Jingxi Ji. According to him, he studied Jiangxi School first, then Wang Anshi's quatrains, and then turned to the quatrains in the late Tang Dynasty. Finally, he "suddenly realized" and no one learned. "Go back to the garden, climb the ancient city, pick chrysanthemums under the east fence, climb flowers and bamboo, everything has an end, and offer more poetry." From then on, poetry is very easy. At the same time, people also admire his "living method" and his ability to "catch dead snakes alive" and "catch them alive". This passage can be said from three aspects.
First, Yang Wanli and Jiangxi School. There are thousands of poems in Jiangxi, and Li, Ye Mengde and others are ashamed of being "rotten and stealthy", "lifeless", "written with difficult words" and "plagiarizing every word". Wang Tingxuan, Yang Wanli's teacher, is also against the Jiangxi School, although he likes Huang Tingjian as much as Ye Mengde. Yang Wanli's criticism of Jiangxi School is not clear. Judging from his creation, he was probably not satisfied with those points, so he didn't leave his schoolbag behind, abolished classicism, and really became natural and close to spoken English. However, he always admired Huang Tingjian and Chen Shidao. Although the "can't do 1000" influenced by the Jiangxi faction has been burned, the habits of the Jiangxi faction have never been eradicated, and they will break out at the first opportunity. After sixty years old, he not only prefaced Jiangxi School Collection, but also supplemented Lv Benzhong's Sect Map, and founded Jiangxi School Continuation, believing that Jiangxi School, like "Southern Zen", was the highest realm in poetry. People in the Southern Song Dynasty often counted him in the Jiangxi school, which is not nonsense. After further investigation, we found that Yang Wanli's poems and Huang Tingjian's poems are easy to understand, embellished with proverbs, and quoted from classics, which are relatively difficult to learn, but Yang Wanli did not jump out of Huang Tingjian's trap of "no words, no places" in theory. Please look at his own sentence: "Poetry was originally refined from vulgarity, but it must have been melted by predecessors. Li Zhi, DUZH, Xu Li and Ruoge in the Tang Dynasty can all inherit it. Li Shi refused to introduce Li Fu and sat between his son and his wife. This is just in line with Chen Changfang's record: "There are no common words, and this Chen has no self, and Huang Luzhi writes poems." In other words, Yang Wanli is still very snobbish about proverbs, and he does not treat them equally and absorbs them widely. He is only willing to choose the ancient and famous spoken language, which has been used by poets and scholars since the Jin and Tang Dynasties-at least in official history, novels and Zen quotations. Admittedly, he doesn't pile up classics, but the common sayings he uses are out of order, which is a more "quaint" part of the vernacular. Readers only see him as free and easy, but they don't know that he is so cautious and careless. For example, when we meet a sophisticated communicator, we only think that he is generous and hospitable, but we don't know that he is very measured and unambiguous in spending money. Just like the poems of Tang priest Hanshan, they look very popular and boast that "my poems are elegant". Later scholars also found that his words were "widely read".
Second, Yang Wanli and the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty. He said that he was tired of learning Jiangxi school, so he changed to Wang Anshi's quatrains and then transitioned to the quatrains in the late Tang Dynasty. As we know, Huang Tingjian despises poetry in the late Tang Dynasty: "Learn from Lao Du's poems, as the saying goes,' Carving a mandarin duck is not a good kind of mandarin duck'; Learn the so-called' practice Liang Yu, * * * we are still greedy, practice greed, what will we do!' Therefore, a poet who studies Jiangxi style must first oppose the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty; But if he is tired of learning Jiangxi style and wants to find another way, he will easily follow the law of pendulum movement and tend to be a poet in the late Tang Dynasty. Yang Wanli said: "Poetry is not better than literature ... but also depends on its profound knowledge and profound writing, so it is implicitly called poetry." This reveals the reason for his transformation, and can be used as a footnote by Liu Kezhuang's words: "Ancient poetry is based on emotion, but today's poetry is based only on memorization, and it has been ill since Du Zimei. Therefore, Zhang Jihe Wang Jianbei tidied up their books a little, canceled the red tape and tended to be intimate. The world likes its simplicity and its competition is effective. So it is a' late Tang style'. "In addition to Li Shangyin, Wen, Pi Rixiu, Lu Guimeng, etc. Poets in the late Tang Dynasty generally seldom use classicism, and quatrains are the most unsuitable genre among the five-seven-character poems, just as the quatrains of Wen, Li, Pi and Lu are more empty than their ancient styles; In Wang Anshi's poems about "using things", quatrains are also relatively clear. Yang Wanli obviously wants to use the ethereal and brisk quatrains in the late Tang Dynasty as a good medicine to save the filled Jiangxi style. As mentioned above, Xu Fu wants to get rid of Jiangxi School and write "simple and natural" poems. He said: "Gong Jing's poems are more like Tang poems, but a hundred poems are not as good as one in the late Tang Dynasty"; Han Ju, another poet who wants to break away from Jiangxi School, also said: "Although the poems of the late Tang Dynasty are humble, they should be called poems; Although the poems written by modern people are magnificent, they can be heard far away, and their reason is slightly beyond investigation. " It is conceivable that they all have the same idea as Yang Wanli, trying to dig out the Tiean set by Huang Ting. Since Yang Wanli, Song poetry has been divided into Jiangxi style and late Tang style, which should be discussed in detail when commenting on "Four Spirits". Different from the "Four Spirits", he didn't study the poems of one or two writers in the late Tang Dynasty in a narrow and inflexible way: he worshipped many writers, including Du Mu, Lu Guimeng and even Huang Tao and Li Xianyong, and he didn't imitate them, but borrowed their help and inherited their inspiration to get rid of the trap of Jiangxi School. His goal is to make vivid and natural poems, so whenever he finds out who has this style, he likes them, whether it is Tao Qian in the Jin Dynasty, Bai Juyi in the middle Tang Dynasty or Zhang Lei in the Northern Song Dynasty.
Third, Yang Wanli's living method. "Living method" is a slogan put forward by Lv Benzhong of Jiangxi School, which means that poets should not break the routine, but also be able to change unexpectedly, giving readers a feeling of "effortless" turning around. Yang Wanli's so-called "living law" certainly includes the unity of law and freedom, but it is not just that. According to his practice, and what he said "everything will come" and "captured alive", it can be said that he is trying to re-establish the flesh-and-blood relationship with things, mainly nature's first mother and child, and restore the naive state of eyes and ears. Good sentences written by ancient writers about love scenes or famous anecdotes of ancient people in various situations of life will become colored glasses for later poets to see things, and even alienate their close relationship with reality, dominate their observation angle and limit their feeling range, making their works "rigid", "unconventional" and "formulaic". They seem to hang masks to smell things and wear gloves to touch things. For example, they don't write their own direct impressions and personal events, but are trapped by ancient famous sayings. They don't think that Du Lao's "Cangzhou to the Moon" or Zhang Sheng's "The West Chamber" is waiting for the moon, but they think that "I want to go home by the wind, but I am afraid that the top of the mountain is too cold" or "it was obviously a night, but it turned into a gloomy cloud." Their minds have lost their innocence and are unfriendly to things, so they don't think they are new. They only know that confirming and photographing the descriptions of the ancients is not "liking the new but hating the old", but "meeting an old friend in a foreign land". Many poems since the Six Dynasties often make us wonder: Does the author really appreciate the scenes written in the poems? Or does he have a good memory and remember the classic idioms about this scene? The sixty-seventh volume of Shen Yue's Book of Song Dynasty says: "Zi Jing's Book of Going to Beijing, Zhong Xuan's Book of Landing, and Zi Jing's Chapter of Zero Rain, just like the sentence in the North Wind, are not close to the history of poetry." Zhong Rong's Poems also said: "Thinking of the monarch is like running water", which is both an eye and an eye; There are many Hengtai on the high platform, which is also unique; Go to the dragon head in the morning, Qiang has no reason to be real; What is the history of "the bright moon shines on the snow"? "Yang Wanli also realized this truth, so he didn't let fresh things fall victim to dead books, scraped off the film that grew on his eyes after reading more ancient books, and described all kinds of scenes that had never been described and were difficult to describe with agility and dexterity. Therefore, Jiang Kui praised him and said that "mountains and rivers everywhere are afraid of seeing the king"-he was afraid of falling into his eyes and gave him a detailed description in his poems. There are many such works in Yang Wanli's existing poems from the beginning, just as Jiangxi style still appears in his later poems; He described his creation as too stereotyped and somewhat unrealistic.
Yang Wanli's main interest is natural scenery. His works about state affairs are far less than Lu You's, and his works about people's livelihood are not as good as Fan Chengda's. In contrast, the content is trivial. How clever, labor-saving and funny his poems are, but they can't go deep into the soul; His writing style of "the scene in front of him" with a wave of his hand also made him write many hasty works.