昌耀是中国当代诗歌景观中的一个独特存在，是一个无法归类的诗人。他的诗歌创作区分于任何一个诗歌流派，很难被纳入任何一面“主义”的旗帜之下。他于1955年远赴青海，但不久被划为右派分子遭遇流放，在长达21年的时间中身处大荒之地。2000年他跳楼自杀时，年仅64岁。他以终生的苦修换来了命运的“一卷书”。其诗歌文本如同仓颉造字，有高古之风，有青铜之气，整体意境混元莽苍，旷朗深邃，凝练而悲怆。他以自己长达45年的诗歌实践证明了：他其实是一个崇尚美的诗人，相信美高于一切，相信诗美可流布天下，相信诗与美在本质上并无二致。
      在具体行文中，本文主要依据诗人作为一个写作者本身所能提供的一切阐述性材料来进行讨论，这其中包括他的信札、论诗的文字等。当然，在此过程中也结合使用了诗人的创作文本和他人的研究文献。全文除引言对昌耀的整体创作及所受评论的历史进行了一个大致梳理外，其核心部分共分三章来完成全部书写。
       第一章是为昌耀的阅读进行溯源，即从昌耀致友人的信札中辨析其精神行踪。进一步来讲，是借助了比较研究的手法，将昌耀的诗歌道路与鲁迅《野草》、惠特曼《草叶集》、陀思妥耶夫斯基《地下室手记》及聂鲁达、阿垅的生平与创作等进行简单的对照性分析，从而将昌耀的诗歌置身于一个大的文学星空而不使其有割裂感。
      第二章是就昌耀的创作谈、诗集自序、后记、自传、访谈进行提炼和展开的。其书写的重心在于对昌耀以命运作诗及竭诚地为其美学判断赋形的强调。昌耀将诗、诗人视为美之象征的理解和表达从来不为现实生存的苦难、屈辱和忧愁所阻。日子再逼仄困厄，他也保有对美与真的坚守。他在诗歌中尝试化解苦难的努力也终有所成。
      论文的最后一章是对昌耀作为诗人写诗的阐释。要点有三：修辞立其诚；不断地修正自我以成就诗之完备的雄心；向人性之初（泪水之善）的本质性还原。通过对昌耀诗歌历程和苦难的流放岁月的追溯，凸显出一条进入其诗歌文本的可视的道路，而诗人打破并熔炼种种拘束后获得书写自由的力道也藉此得以留存。

Chang Yao is unique in the landscape of contemporary Chinese poetry. He is a poet who cannot be classified because his poetry writing is different from any genre of poetry, and it is difficult to be labeled as any existing poetry style. 
He went to Qinghai in 1955, but was shortly mistaken as one of the bourgeois rightists and was exiled. Since then he had been reduced to and trapped in the barren land of Qinghai for 21 years. When he committed suicide by jumping from a tall hospital building in the year 2000, he was only 64 years old. The sufferings and hard work all through his lifetime were all crystallized in his poetry. His poetic text is like the Chinese characters created by Cangjie in Chinese legend, like the unearthed Bronze pieces of ancient China, with the archaic，solemn, elegant style. His poems boast great beauty in terms of the artistic context, concise in words but rich, profound and pregnant in gist, tragic in aesthetics. He proved with his forty-five years of poetry creation and writing practice that he is actually a poet who admires beauty, believing that beauty is the most important poetry principle and believing that poetic beauty can be spread and enjoyed by people all over the world by overcoming the barriers of time and space, and that poetry and beauty are essentially the same. 
The thesis features self-illuminating discussion based on all the elaborative materials that the poet could provide as a writer himself, including his letters, articles on poem critique and so on. Of course, the poet's creative texts and other people's research on the poet and his poetry are also integrated into the discussion of the thesis. 
The structure of the thesis goes as follows: in Introduction part, Chang Yao's overall poet creation and the comments received are outlined. The main part of thesis is consisted of three chapters: the first chapter aims to trace the sources of Chang Yao's reading, that is, to identify his spiritual growth journey by reading and interpreting Chang Yao's letters to his friends. The method of comparative research is used in this part to compare and contrast the path of Chang Yao's poetry writing with that of Lu Xun's Wild Grass, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Neruda’s and Ah Long's life and their writing, so that Chang Yao's poetry writing is placed against a large literary starry sky instead of being analyzed as a literary case in isolation.
The second chapter is the elaborated discussion of Chang Yao's own speeches or remarks on poetry writing, prefaces and postscripts of his poem collections, and his autobiographies and interviews as well. The thesis emphasizes on Chang Yao's poem-writing attitude and his dedication to shaping his aesthetic values and judgments in his writing. Chang Yao's understanding and expression of poems and poets as a symbol of beauty had never been hindered by the suffering, humiliation and sorrows he endured all through his life. Though hard life and reality reduced him into unfavorable situation, bitter adversary or even predicament, he adhered to his faith in beauty and truth in poetry-writing. In the end, he achieved a lot through his attempts by withstanding and confronting the sufferings and adversaries in his life.
The final chapter of the thesis is an interpretation of Chang Yao's poem-writing as a poet. Three points are discussed in this chapter: Chang Yao's efforts in establishing good faith by rhetoric in poetry; his constant improving of himself to achieve the ambition of poetry perfection; and his pursuit of restoring the essence of humanity (the goodness of tears). Through the tracing of Chang Yao ’s poetic writing career and his bitter years of exile, the wirier of the thesis finally finds out the correct path into Chang Yao’s poetic texts and poetic world. Thus the poet’s power to obtain freedom of writing after getting rid of various restraints is pinpointed and preserved.