“诗囚”的视野变异及其艺术渊源

The Vision Variation of the “Poet-Prisoner” and its Artistic Origin

孟郊向来被视为"诗囚",但前人对孟诗却有"跼天蹐地"和"胚胎造化"两种截然相反的评价。这一矛盾在孟诗中客观存在,都根源于孟郊将元化之道与圣贤之心合一的哲理认识,因而在诗人以天道比拟人事的创作思路中得到统一,并相互转化。生命的紧迫感和现实的压迫感导致他和韩愈、卢仝、李贺等尚奇诗人都感受到天地的狭窄,这就促使他们的艺术视野从传统的"天地至广大"变为"世界亦可小",并在天宝大历诗人的同道中追溯艺术表现的渊源,产生"补元化""探天根,穿月胁"的惊人奇想,使李白处理天人关系的艺术构思方式完全反转。其意义在于发掘出"笔补造化天无功"的创作理念,为中唐诗歌开拓了深邃奇险的新境界。

Meng Jiao(孟郊) has been regarded as a"poet-prisoner", but there were two completely opposite evaluations about his poems in the past,. One opinion was that his poems were "cramped and craven in the vast world"(跼天蹐地), while the other thought his poems were so great to be "the origin of the world"(胚胎造化). The two contradictory aspects did exist in Meng Jiao’s poems, and both of them came from his philosophical view which combined the path of the creation of the world with the heart of the sage. In his ideas of poem writing, he compared human matter to divine order, which were unified and transformable with each other. With a sense of urgency of life and a sense of oppression of reality, Meng Jiao felt the narrowness of the world just like such poets as Han Yu(韩愈), Lu Tong(卢仝) and Li He(李贺) who were all famous for advocating peculiarity in poem writing. They were prompted to change their artistic vision from the traditional idea that "the world is extremely vast" to the idea that "the world can also be small", and to seek for the origin of artistic expressions from those poets who lived during the reign of Emperor Tianbao(天宝) and Emperor Dali(大历) of the Tang Dynasty and had similar artistic views. Some fantastic ideas came into being, such as "making up with the creation of the world", and "exploring the ultimate of the sky and the moon", which was totally contrary to Li Bai’s(李白) artistic conception of dealing with the relationship between heaven and human. Its significance lies in the discovery of the creative concept of "writing can make up with what the Creator failed to do", which opened up a new profound and ingenious realm for the poetry of the Mid-Tang Dynasty.