Edgar Allan Poe advocated that the shorter a poem, the better. The name "long poem" is self-contradictory, and the longest poem can't be read for more than half a minute. China's poetry is a blitzkrieg in literary appreciation, with an average of only two or three minutes. Compared with western novellas, China's long poems are just a light kite scissors in rhyme. Of course, it is forbidden to rhyme a word twice in a poem, which limits the length of China's poems. However, if shoes form feet, feet also form shoes; Poetic style may be the product of poetic heart and meet the needs of poetic heart. Compared with western poets, China poets can only be regarded as sculptors with cherry stones and two-inch ivory squares. However, a short poem can have a distant meaning, and contraction does not hinder extension, as if we want to see farther, and every eyebrow is frowning. Foreign short poems are more expensive than sharp poems. China poets want you to see infinity from simplicity.

A China poet said: "Words are endless, meaning is endless"; Another poet said: "it is difficult to write such a landscape as it is now;" The fuzziness and accuracy of grey songs just meet the conditions of welland's poetry theory.

This is the characteristic of China's poems that ordinary readers in the West think: full of hints. I want to put it another way, saying that this is a silence of pregnancy. What you say is not as good as what you don't say, but what you can't say by innuendo. Keats famously said: The music you can hear is really beautiful, but the music you can't hear is more beautiful.

Our poet also said: "Silence is better than sound" and said: "Understanding silent strings means beauty." Sometimes, he lures you to the edge of the language, and there is a deep silence below: "That makes sense, I forgot what to argue." "Speak indifferently and leave the single ensemble." Sometimes he can't do it, which makes you disappointed with Philip Burkart: "How beautiful she looks, open the pearly casement and sit with a frown; You can see the bright tears on her cheeks now, but not the man she loves so painfully "; When I asked your students under a pine tree, "My teacher," he replied, "went to pick herbs." But in which corner of the mountain, through all these clouds, how could I know? . This "I don't know" is so sultry! An intriguing fact is that China's poems end in a questioning tone, which is more than any western poem I know. Give a very common example. There is a formula of "where" in Latin poetry of the Middle Ages in the West, which is used to lament unforgivable death. This formula has been used in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Czech poems. The most wonderful one is Wei Rong's Song of Ancient Beauty, which asks where Xi Shi, Nan Wei or Wang Zhaojun and Yang Guifei are, and then draws a conclusion: "But where was the snow last year? "

Coincidentally, this formula is most used in China's poems, such as "All the strong men die, and the rest are safe"; "Where is the emperor in today's pavilion, the Yangtze River flows freely outside the threshold"; "The color of flowers has changed this year, who will bloom next year"; "Where are the people who come to play with the moon? The scenery is vaguely like last year "; "Spring is gone, where are people? Where is spring where people go? "

Ask without answering, answer with asking, and give you a thrilling answer with nothing to swallow. As Hamlet said before he died, all that remained was silence-silence deeply immersed in tears and sighs.

Therefore, western new punctuation is often not suitable for our old poems. Punctuation marks increase the clarity of sentences, but also freeze the flow and make the coherence fragmented. Every complex psychological expression is forced by punctuation marks. Wearing a simple mask, punctuation marks can give poetry clarity, which is often a mean and thin clarity, which hinders what Hoffman stahle called: the great art of background contrast and contrast, the mystery of candlelight shadow.

-Qian Zhongshu