Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.10, 2014

 

“Articulation of the Breath of Poetry” and the Construction of Rhythm in Chinese New Poetry

(Abstract)

 

Zhao Liming

 

The “articulation of the breath of poetry” (shiqi shuo, 诗气说) has a profound cultural tradition in China. In traditional Chinese poetics, the basic elements of lyrical poetry have a close relationship with “breath” or qi (气). Poetry is the message of life; rhythm echoes breath, and the emergence of poetry is the reduction of breath to syllables. The life consciousness and spirit of nature revealed by “the articulation of the breath of poetry” was an important inspiration for the construction of the natural rhythm of the new poetry. Because the aims of their construction differ, treatments of “the articulation of the breath of poetry” in modern poetry are divergent: the free verse school reads in it the naturalness of rhythm; the traditionalists see in it the metrical verse of five and seven syllable lines. “The articulation of the breath of poetry,” which takes life, nature and freedom as its original material, gives a transcendent power to the new poetry, one that not only transcends the written words and penetrates the rights and wrongs, the crooked and the straight, of different concepts of rhythm, but can also transcend the confines of all ages and all countries to set the direction for constructing the rhythm of new poetry. “The articulation of the breath of poetry” answers the question of “Why is it so?” asked by the theory of natural rhythm, and provides a historical basis for integrating different theories of rhythm and establishing “the rhythm of breath.”