Search

Whether Tang poetry is better than Song poetry or vice versa remains one of the unsettled disputes in the history of Chinese poetic criticism. People are divided as to whether they should follow Tang's tradition or Song's style when creating poems. This dispute was started by such scholars as Wei Tai, Zhang Jie and Chen Yanxiao at the turn of Southern Song Dynasty; it then became a hotter issue in the late Song and early Yuan dynasties, when scholars like Ye Shi, Yanyu, Liu Kezhuang offered their deepened understandings of the problem. The discussions made by the scholars in that period can help deepen our understanding of the aesthetic feature and value of poems in general and of the development of the Song poetry in particular, and throw light on the direction the poetic creation will take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]