Chinese Poetry Analysis

Poetry has had a long standing place in English literature. It has helped a grand plethora of people express thoughts, ideas, and convey emotions. Poetry in itself is considered a form of art and the way it's understood depends on who reads it. There are several types of poetry including; free verse (where one writes freely with no pattern), Acrostic (where the first letter of each line of the poem spells out a word), Elegy (a poem in which is often on a sadder note about someone's death, but ends with a comforting feeling), Haiku (a form of poetry originally from Japan that consists of 3 non-rhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. ) and etc. In Chinese Literature, Chinese poetry has many forms in itself, but they all fall into categories, for example; 律诗，词，歌，and 赋 (even though these categories break down as well.).

律诗 or code verse can be broken down into lesser categories; such as 古体, 古诗, and 绝句. 律诗 goes back to the ancient times of China. Its base is a couplet. A couplet is two lines where the last words rhyme. In these poems, there is no limit to which couplets can be used. In American poetry, couplets simply have their last words rhyme. In Chinese poetry, couplets must match by characters, though the ends still rhyme. The 诗 poems came to be in the Tang dynasty and these poems made many poets famous. These rhyming poems became popular in this dynasty and set the stage for rhyming poems throughout future dynasties/eras. Similarly 古体 also uses couplets, however the structure, rhyme, and content are different. 古诗 is another form of the code verse, it means ancient poetry. It also follows the same path of having couplets and it contains lines of five or seven characters. 古诗 first came into being with the nineteen...

... middle of paper ...

... in the east." He then goes on to say how, with a system in which complex concepts are built from specific images. Again, another example, if one were to think about the complex concept of the color red, one might think of some images such as: a rose, a cherry and etc. This idea, this ideogrammic method, came an essential part of the development of Imagism.

It is pretty amazing to think that one man, with he help of a deceased man's leftover works could bring about such a change in the literature that we know of today and to think that he was inspired by different aspects of Japanese and Chinese culture. Truly, I believe that without Mr. Pound's ideogrammic method (brought to him thanks to the leftover works of Ernest Fenollosa) there would not have been the modernist literature (not just poetry), or even some of the poetry from these modern times (the now) today.