Readers Gaining Satisfaction from Their Feelings of Poetry—Prescriptiveness of "Emotion Foremost" of Chinese Poetics on Aesthetic Understanding and Interpretation

"Versifying is the same as interpretation", a verse of Yang Shen of the Ming Dynasty reminds us that versifying should start with and be based on emotion, so should the interpretation of poetry. The ambiguity and mutability of "emotion" provide large space for the flexible interpretation. The theory of "emotion foremost" existed in Chinese poetics indicates that the understanding of emotion is not based on logical cognition but on individual life experience and perception. The individuality and irreplaceability of experience determine that our aesthetic intuitions of "emotion" can not completely overlap, and readers' understanding of "emotion" must be accompanied by the association of personal life experience. The hermeneutics terms "Poetry is amorphous" and "Poetry has no fixed interpretation" were put forward by Lu Wenchao in the Qing Dynasty, based on the differences between readers' and poets' feelings. Therefore, by putting "emotion" into the field of literary hermeneutics, we find that "understanding poems with emotion" can better show the multi-aesthetic understanding and interpretation of the general principle—"poets have no universal or ultimate interpretation"—of Chinese poetics compared with "understanding poems with meaning".