On the afternoon of May 14, 2021, Mr. Du Xiaoqin, director of Chinese Department, professor of ancient literature and doctoral supervisor of Peking University, gave a lecture entitled "Examples of Research Methods for Metrics of Chinese Classical Poetry Style " to all teachers and students in the hall on the fourth floor of the library of Beijing Foreign Studies University. Professor Zhan Furui, Dean of School of Chinese Language And Literature, presided over this lecture.

    At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Du talked about the origin of his research on tonal pattern and rhyme of Chinese poetry: from the Tang Dynasty, Chinese metrical verse began to be popular. We can study them  from both cultural and stylistic perspectives; We can study both "what is written in poetry" and "how to write poetry". The ancients must choose the style when they write poetry, so when people read poetry today, they should start with distinguishing styles and review the academic history of stylistic research. After that, Professor Du introduced the definitions of style, meter and rhythm, and divided the development of rhythm form of ancient poetry into three stages: the music rhythm of songs and poems in Pre-Qin and Han Dynasties, the rhythm of early literati poems and the rhythm of poems after the period of Yongming. Professor Du further pointed out that after the period of Yongming, the rhythm of classical poetry could be subdivided into sentence rhythm, couplet rhythm, couplet rhythm and rhyme pattern. He also made a detailed analysis of the rhythm rules of Yongming poetry based on ancient poetry theory. There are several important changes in the evolution from the Yongming rhyme to the recent poetic rhyme. The first is the associative rhyme, which changes from the unfixed associative rule to the definite cohesive one; The second is the rule of single sentence, which changes from two or five characters to two or four characters to different level oblique. The third is the rhyme style. In the chapter, the rhymes are reduced by the oblique rhymes, which determines to be only one rhyme in one poem and the flat rhyme becomes the main one. In the study of style, meter and rhythm, we should not only find the changes, but also pay attention to the causes of the changes.

     Professor Du also pointed out that the famous poets of Tang Dynasty had their own styles. When studying Tang Dynasty poetry, we should start with the style, analyze the pattern, identify the style and its origin, Then he took the poems of Taizong of Tang Dynasty, Sijie of Early Tang Dynasty, Cui Hao, Li Bai and so on as examples to carry out specific analysis. He probed into the relationship between the physical characteristics and the expression of emotion in ancient Chinese poetry, and Du Fu's achievement of "gradually becoming more and more refined in poetry".

     Finally, Professor Du concluded that the analysis of poetry should be closely combined with the understanding of the text and textual research, and the research of poetry style should be carried out to the performance function of poetry and the performance purpose of the poet. In the interactive part, combining the two aspects of poetry research and poetry creation, Professor Du made answers one by one to the problems raising by the students and teachers, such as the style of obfuscation and the style of imitation. 

     After the lecture, Professor Zhan FuRui spoke highly of Professor Du's lecture and summed up two points: firstly, we should value the academic tradition, we should inherit the excellent academic tradition and think about how to break through the tradition; secondly, research should pay attention to the problems and the process of searching specifically and deeply. Professor Du attaches great importance to the study of style and text, and his research field is not limited to Tang Dynasty poetry. From Professor Du, we can learn a lot of academic methods.

    Teachers and students said that Professor Du Xiaoqin's lectures were rigorous in theory, evidence-oriented, witty in teaching and meticulous in analysis. As Chinese major students, we can get a glimpse of the academy; as a member of Beijing Foreign Studies University, it also deepens our understanding of culture.