Yuan Literature II

2 trends when Southern Song fell:

• Yimin = loyalists = leftover subjects – minds trapped in previous dynasty
• New areas of China opened up – travels. Many Buddhist and Daoist monks went to see the great temple complex at Mount Wutai and new capital in Dadu. It brought about a sense of unity.

Implications of the end of the examination system

Since there are no more imperial examinations, the writers started to do other stuff in its place.

Poetic competitions were organized in the south. They resurrected the ideals and structure of the examination system but its main focus is literary composition independent of political mobility.

Instead of testing the standard core of shared info, they created societies that examined different writers on their ability to write poetry of a single topic.

The institutions judged the quality or the works and awarded prizes.

Some of the themes were flowers, colophons on calligraphy and paintings, parting poems, poems celebrating appointments to positions, poetic gatherings, historical sites and events, etc.

Most important themes: palace poems and “bamboo songs” from West Lack in Hangzhou.

Hundreds of colophons and independently compiled and printed collections of poems on a single theme.

Like the imperial examinations, these events and competitions resulted in large gatherings, which strengthened communication and the cultural bond between writers.

The Poetic Society of Moon Spring

The most important society was Yuequan yinshe = 月泉吟社 = The Poetic Society of Moon Spring.

In Nov. 1286, Wu Wei sent out invitations to the poetic societies that he knew asking writers to compose a poem on the topic “Random Inspirations in Field and Garden in Days of Spring” and submit it on the Lantern Festival – 15th of 1st lunar month = Jan. 29, 1287. On April 16 the winners will be announced. Aoubt 2735 poems were collected and judged by eminent writers in the society, all of whom refused to serve the Yuan. Poets used pen names and names of examiners were not released. About 280 poems were selected, ranked, and published with commentary by judges and the number and amount of awards in the book called “Poems of the Poetic Society of Moon Spring.”

Top winner: 70 ft of silk, 5 pens, 5 sticks of ink.

Yuan

The poetic societies, especially The Poetic Society of Moon Spring, were acts of resistance to the Yuan.

They kept the value of writing alive as a cultural act as well as linked social and cultural authority to competition and rewards of good writing.

Due to the societies, the main feature of Yuan poetry is the collection of poems on a single topic, which is a highly cohesive social act.

Another remarkable characteristic is that the authorities did not interfere with the societies’ development of the purely private and extensive network of communication.

Two Major Figures

• 方回 = Fang Hui (1227-1307)
• 戴表元 = Dai Biaoyuan (1244-1311)

Fang Hui

Fang Hui was one of the first officials to surrender to the Mongols. He served briefly under the Mongols and then spent the majority of his time moving around near Hangzhou and wrote. His character had issues but his poetry and critical works are all accepted.

Major work: 瀛奎律髓 = Yingkui Lüsui = The Essentials of the Regulated Verse of the Poets of the Tang and Song. It contains 49 chapters. Fang Hui marked words in a poem that indicate its “eye,” which is its point of critical excellence, and he critiqued each poem with a short statement. He wanted to renew the place of Jiangxi School in the tradition to correct the overly refined and vulgar nature of Four Lings andd the Rivers and Lakes poets.

Fang Hui advocated yizu sanzong = the “one progenitor and three ancestors” – Du Fu, Huang Tingjian, Chen Shidao, Chen Yuyi, who are zhenshi zhi pai = the “correct school of poetry” and have the highest standards of cretivity Fang Hui emphasized fa = “correct methods” for both words and lines stressed that the highest style was “thin and hard” (瘦硬 = shouying), “seasoned and strong” (老辣 = laola), and had something definite from which it stemmed (出处来历 = chuchu laili). He repeated the major points of the Jiangxi School as defining characteristics of good verse: poetry should represent loftiness in its establishment of aims, hard work in its application of the mind, extensive reading, and authenticity in following the masters. He did point out some flaws in Jiangxi School also though.

He wrote 2715 poems, almost all of which were written during early Yuan.

Dai Biaoyuan

Dao Biaoyuan was a writer who had an extensive social network centered on Hangzhou. His best works were his prose essays and he advocated the creation of poetics based on the Tang model. The contents of his writings contained the complex relationship between social change, the abrogation of the examination system, and the status of writers. He encouraged his students to study not just the High Tang but rather all Tang writers and resist imitation. Basically, he told his students to “write like the Tang but like no particular writer from the Tang.” His own poetry was not too good though.

In Hangzhou, he gathered a group of local writers linked by extensive social networks for communication and exchange. They had poems sent back and forth as “matching rhymes” or “response poems” – modern critics say that these verses are artificial, occasional, and lacking in social realism, so they are mostly ignored; still, they represent Yuan writers’ works and lyric explorations of the quality of friendship and the significance of social encounters.

Powerpoint

Powerpoint