“POETRY CARVED IN STONE”: DOCUMENTARY, LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONNOTATION IN BAI JUYI’S POETRY INSCRIPTION

Abstract

The poetry inscription, with Bai Juyi in the Middle Tang Era as its representative, began to express purely personal emotions in terms of content, which reflects the poet’s creative individuality. Bai takes stone as his friend, loves it, chants it, and inscribes poems on it, endowing it natural and personal qualities. Bai was the first poet to consciously combine “poetry” and “stone” with nearly 20 kinds of poetry inscriptions. Compared with book documents, Bai’s poetry inscriptions not only have the philological value of text criticism, but also have multiple functions, i. e., reproducing the historical context of poetry creation and transmitting as a “linguistic landscape”. Such humanistic connotation determines the significance of Bai’s poetry inscription in the history of Chinese literature and culture.