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Yang Ze made his debut in the literary world with a collection of poems titled The Birth of the Rose School in 1977. During four decades of his career, he has published four collections of poems, the most recent of which is Nineteen New Poems in 2016. Renowned for his lyric style, Yang Ze in fact exhibits in his work a signature life aesthetics that he has gradually perfected as his age advances. This thesis aims to look into the themes, literary devices and aesthetic features present in Yang Ze's poems.
My aim is to delineate the poet's life aesthetics by examining three major themes underlying his poems-- the relation between love and purity, observation of the reality, and of death. These three piece together what Yang Ze's life aesthetics look like. The discussion about love and purity is the first theme that characterizes Yang's poems. His writing of love and romance is in fact affirmation of his belief and insistence in the spiritual purity. The second theme, reality, is Yang's reply to the turbulence of his time. His identification with the island grows as he makes adjustments to reality, foreshadowing the coming changes in his aesthetic styles. The third and final theme, death, is dealt with from the perspective of the dying. The approaching death, a recurring metaphor in Yang's work, gives away poet's attitude toward life as it is capsulated within the lines--carpe diem. As he strengthens his beliefs, answers to the reality and faces death, at the heart of Yang's poems sit the idea of rebellion and resistance. This is the key to understanding his poetics and the particular life aesthetics Yang exhibits. This thesis is my attempt to provide a new perspective into Yang's poems by analyzing and comparing the three main themes in his work, which I hope to complement what has not been discussed in the past and to draw attention to the essence of Yang's poetics.
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