On the Sublime Beauty in Li He’s Poetry
Abstract
Li He, known as the “Poetic Ghost,” possesses a highly distinctive personality, and his poetry is renowned for its peculiar, grotesque, and fantastical style. This paper frames the discussion of Li He’s unique sublime beauty within Western theories of the sublime, drawing on the aesthetics of Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant. Specifically, Longinus’s theory of rhetorical transcendence highlights the grandeur of language and imagery in Li He’s poetry; Burke’s concept of the sublime rooted in terror elucidates the aesthetic experience derived from death imagery and the transformation of pain; Kant’s idea of rational transcendence reveals Li He’s spiritual resistance under the oppression of fate. Li He’s poetry not only portrays the individual’s insignificance and powerlessness before history and time but also achieves a poetic transcendence of harsh realities through artistic expression. This form of sublime beauty establishes a cross-temporal dialogue with Western theories while retaining the Chinese poetic characteristic of being “mysterious yet grounded in the human world,” thereby offering new aesthetic perspectives for the study of classical poetry.
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