Title

The Frame of Wang Fuzhi’s Poetics Related to His View on the Relationship between the Music and Poetry: Chinese Lyricism and Trans-Metaphysics in Chinese Though

Author

Dr. Chi Xiao

Genre

Article  

Pages

67-99

Download

Language

Chinese

Key words

Discussing poetry in musical terms, “Poetry swinging between shade andlight”, Trans-metaphysics, Sheng-qing , The Frame of Wang Fuzhi’s poetics

Abstract

    Started with a Ming theoretical phenomenon of discussing poetry in terms of the music, this essay discusses Wang Fuzhi’s view on the relationship between the music and poetry, the very frame of Wang’s poetic. First, the essay demonstrates that, carrying on the Confucian tradition, Wang in interpreting Confucian classics apotheosizes the music for its paramount cosmological and ethical significance. In his writing referred to poetry by the latter’s invisibility and limitlessness. Yet, Wang’s proposition, “Poetry is swinging between shade and light,” also asserts that music as the transcendent is never cut off from the more immanent one, the poetry, but could be embraced in the poetry. At the same time, the poetry could also stumbles across the superior by reaching the celestial realm. At this point, apart from offering a new way to see the relationship between the music and poetry, Wang actually reveals a tradition in Chinese art and literature, correspondent with the “trans-metaphysics” in Chinese philosophy, a tradition which advocates interflowing and interpenetration between the visible and the invisible, between the concrete and the abstract, and between the temporal and the spatial. From his point of view to treat the music as the paramount realm of poetry, in lyric criticism Wang pays high regard to sheng-qing, i.e., making phonologic effect of syllables emotionally expressive. Therefore, he believes that sound is prior to be considered between character and sound and the linguistic discourse in verse should be made in musical terms. By the same token, he thinks that

phonological form of lyric language should lead meaning in verse while deliberately setting up a meaning for poetry should be denied. For Wang’s frame of poetics, the importance of his view on relationship between the music and poetry is the realization of significant form itself. Furthermore, by treating music as the supremacy of poetry, Wang basically regards poetry as an art of time, an art which embodies the cosmic accord with its rhythm. However, by his concept tha t poetry is swinging between shade and light, between the visible and the invisible, Wang also, at the same time, can carry on and develop the lyric theory of “scene and feeling in poetry” that evolved in Song period, and thereby highlights the visible, spatial world in poetry. Yet, this visible world must embrace the perpetual dynamics, and in the spatial dimension and in synthetic sense, embodies the cosmic accord.