Abstract:

The Tongguang Style poetry, which had its origins in the Song School poetry during the reigns of Emperor Daoguang and Xianfeng (1821-1861), represented a profound innovative force within traditional poetry in both theory and creation. Tongguang Style poets also had systematically theoretical construction of the characteristics of their creation. They rebelled against the "orthodox form" in previous poetry and opposed Zhang Zhidong's theory of "qingqie" (explicit), by raising a set of binaries such as "qingqie" and "pise" (recondite), as well as "guangyi" (transparent) and "jianshen" (difficult). Zheng Xiaoxu also said that in modern society, "everything changes with disturbance outside and complicated moods boiling inside". Therefore, poets should write poems that "are out of musicality" and "without expectations for accuracy". They also traced their own style of poetry back to Ya (Court Hymns) poetry through positioning Ya antithetically against Feng (Airs of the States) by referring to The Book of Songs. The theory of "scholarly poetry" was completed by Shen Zengzhi through his poetry criticism that centered on "yi" (idea), "bi" (writing), and "se" (material), and criticism of metaphysical poetry during the Eastern Jin dynasty (317-420), with the Zheng Xiaoxu's words quoted above as its historical reason. A series of adjectives used by the Tongguang Style poets in their comments reflected this new change in poetics on aesthetic intuition. In many ways, the poetics of Tongguang Style poets coincided with T. S. Eliot's, the eminent Western modernist poet born later, because they both came to a similar turning point in the history of poetry of their own.

Key words: Tongguang Style poetry, characteristics, recondite and difficult, scholarly poetry, modernism