Yuan Zhen(元稹), A.D. 779-831. A native of Xi’an, he lost his father at the age of eight and came from a poor family. He was intelligent by nature, learning poetry at the age of nine, reading the scriptures at the age of ten, taking the examination in Beijing at the age of fourteen, and attaining the title of Mingjing and the first rank at the age of fifteen.
元稹
yuán zhěn
Popular works:
Main Experiences:
In 799 A.D., he served in Hezhong Prefecture.
In 806 A.D., he served as the left picker. He was a sharp and outspoken person. He was in the position of an admonition officer and repeatedly wrote letters on politics, but because of his support for the imperial historian Pei Du and others, he offended the prime minister and was sent out as a lieutenant of Henan County.
In 809 A.D., the prime minister promoted, served as supervisor. He was promoted by the prime minister and became the imperial inspector. He was appointed as the detailed restoration envoy of Dongchuan in Jiannan, visiting the people’s hardships and impeaching the wrongdoing officials, showing the lofty style as the imperial inspector. When Yuan Zhen returned to Chang’an from his mission, he was assigned to Luoyang, the eastern capital, because of his fear of the eunuchs and nobles and his courage to fight. However, he was not deterred and continued to expose some of the law-breaking and rampant officials.
In 810 A.D., he impeached Henan Yin Fang Shi for corruption, but he was fined one quarter’s salary and recalled to Chang’an for having suspended Fang Shi without authorization. On his way back to the capital, Yuan Zhen stayed at the Shixuei stage in Huazhou. The eunuchs Qiu Shiliang and Liu Shiyuan arrived later and forced Yuan Zhen to give up the main hall, wounding him in the face with a horsewhip. Instead of harboring the eunuchs, Emperor Xianzong relegated him to the post of Caojun of Jiangling Prefecture.
Bai Juyi wrote a letter in his defense, but Emperor Xianzong ignored it. Yuan Zhen spent five years in Jianglingfu. He had hoped that Pei Ji would return to the imperial court with his help. However, Pei Ji died of illness in the sixth year of Yuanhe, which was a great blow to Yuan Zhen. In order to find a way to advance in his career, he had to change his mind and attach himself to Yan Shou, the governor of Jiangling and Jingnan, and befriended Cui Tanjun, the eunuch who supervised the military. Cui Tanjun loved Yuan Zhen’s poems and treated him with respect. Yuan Zhen’s shift from fighting eunuchs to befriending them was a major change in his political attitude.
In 815 A.D., Yuan Zhen returned to the imperial court by imperial decree. Because there was no one powerful enough to invoke him, he became the Secretary of Tongzhou again.
In 819 A.D., Yuan Zhen returned to the imperial court again and served as a minister of food.
In 829 A.D., Yuan Zhen was appointed as the left minister of Shangshu, and in the following year, Yuan Zhen was appointed as the minister of Wuchang Army, and in the second year of his stay in E., he died of a serious illness.
Literary Achievements:
Yuan Zhen divided his poems into ten styles in the article “Narrative Poems Sent to Le Tian Shu”, and according to their contents, they can be divided into three categories: first, satirical poems with considerable meaning; second, lyrical and aphoristic poems that recite and write about sexual feelings and model objects; and third, eulogistic poems and erotic poems.
Ironic poems occupy an important place in Yuan Zhen’s poetry. He considered these poems to be the most valuable, expressing the people’s desire for peace and his own political advocacy of using the rule of literature instead of the sword. These poems are often characterized by the fact that they are not poetry, but by the fact that they are not poetry, that they are complex, that they have several meanings, and that they are less perfect than Bai Juyi’s work.
Yuan Zhen wrote the most poems that belonged to the category of lyrical aria. Most of these poems are in the form of five or seven lines. These poems are mostly in five- or seven-line meter. There are “small pieces” that are written in front of the flower house, and “small pieces” that are written to express one’s feelings at a time, but they also include poems that are written to drive away the words, and to maximize the sound and rhyme of the poems, which are either a thousand words or five hundred words in meter. Although Yuan Zhen placed these poems in a secondary position in his own creation, he strove to be innovative in his art.
Yuan Zhen’s erotic and eulogistic poems are the most artistically distinctive. Yuan Zhen was originally married to Wei, and they were very much in love. Wei’s unfortunate early death, Yuan Zhen cares for the sense of the past, had the Jin Dynasty poet Pan Yue’s “Mourning for the dead” poems as a precedent, wrote a number of poems in memory of Wei. Such as the “sadness” of the three poems, etc. deliberately portrayed Wei’s life and death of all kinds of scenarios, expressing the enthusiasm of longing, lingering back and forth, the feelings of true and sincere, infectious force is very strong, can be called a masterpiece. As for the erotic poems he wrote, he was good at writing about love between men and women. He had a love experience in his early years, and these poems often have his specific real feelings.
