History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 29
Chapter 29: The Chinese Poetic Tradition — Continuities and Transformations
1. Introduction: Poetry at the Heart of Chinese Civilization
If there is a single thread that runs through the entire three-thousand-year history of Chinese literature — a thread that connects the earliest inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels to the digital poetry of the twenty-first century — it is the thread of poetry. In no other major literary civilization has poetry occupied so central, so pervasive, and so enduring a position as it has in China. Poetry in China has been not merely a literary form among others but the supreme literary form — the form that has been most intimately connected to the deepest values, the highest aspirations, and the most characteristic modes of thought and feeling of Chinese civilization. From the anonymous folk songs of the Shijing to the regulated verse of the Tang masters, from the lyric songs of the Song dynasty ci poets to the revolutionary anthems of the Maoist era, from the classical-style poems that continue to be composed by millions of Chinese today to the experimental free verse of the contemporary avant-garde, poetry has been the art form through which the Chinese people have most fully and most eloquently expressed their understanding of themselves and their world.
The centrality of poetry to Chinese culture is a phenomenon that requires explanation, not merely assertion. In the Western literary tradition, poetry has gradually ceded its position of cultural preeminence to prose fiction — the novel has been the dominant literary form in the West since at least the eighteenth century, and poetry, while still revered, has become a minority art form with a relatively small readership. In China, by contrast, poetry has maintained its cultural centrality to a remarkable degree — not only in the sense that classical Chinese poetry continues to be read, memorized, and recited by millions of Chinese people, but also in the sense that the values and the sensibilities that are associated with the poetic tradition — a sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world, an awareness of the transience of human life, a capacity for emotional depth combined with formal restraint, and a belief in the power of language to capture and to communicate the most profound human experiences — continue to shape Chinese literary culture and Chinese aesthetic consciousness in the most fundamental ways.
This chapter attempts to synthesize the poetic thread that runs through the entire history of Chinese literature — to trace the major forms, the major transformations, and the major continuities of the Chinese poetic tradition from its earliest beginnings to the present day. It is, necessarily, a selective and a synoptic account — the full history of Chinese poetry would require not a single chapter but a library of volumes — but it seeks to identify the essential features and the essential movements of a tradition that is one of the greatest and one of the most enduring achievements of human civilization.[1]
2. Origins: The Shijing and the Foundations of the Poetic Tradition
The Shijing (诗经, Classic of Poetry or Book of Songs), compiled around the sixth century BCE from materials that may date back to the eleventh century BCE, is the foundational text of the Chinese poetic tradition — the work from which all subsequent Chinese poetry, in a sense, descends. The 305 poems of the Shijing — which include folk songs from the various feudal states of the Zhou dynasty, ritual hymns sung at court ceremonies, and dynastic odes celebrating the achievements of the Zhou royal house — established the fundamental forms, the fundamental themes, and the fundamental aesthetic principles that would shape Chinese poetry for the next three thousand years.
The folk songs (国风, guofeng, "airs of the states") that constitute the most celebrated portion of the Shijing are poems of extraordinary freshness and emotional directness. They depict the joys and the sorrows of ordinary life — love and courtship, marriage and separation, labor and leisure, the beauty of the natural world and the passage of the seasons — in language that is simple, concrete, and rhythmically compelling. The characteristic formal feature of the Shijing folk songs is the four-character line (四言, siyan), which establishes a rhythmic pattern that is both regular and flexible, and which would remain an important verse form throughout the history of Chinese poetry. The characteristic rhetorical feature of the Shijing is the use of natural imagery to evoke and to comment on human emotions — a technique that the Great Preface (大序, Daxu) to the Shijing classified under the three categories of fu (赋, direct statement or exposition), bi (比, comparison or analogy), and xing (兴, evocative image or affective stimulus). The technique of xing — in which a poem begins with an image from the natural world (a singing bird, a flowing river, a blossoming tree) that resonates emotionally with the human situation that is the poem's primary subject — became one of the most fundamental and most distinctive features of the Chinese poetic tradition, establishing a mode of indirect, suggestive, and emotionally resonant expression that would characterize Chinese poetry at its finest for millennia to come.
The Shijing was canonized by the Confucian tradition as one of the Five Classics (五经, Wujing) — the foundational texts of Chinese civilization — and Confucius himself was reported to have said: "The three hundred poems can be summed up in a single phrase: 'The thoughts are without depravity'" (诗三百，一言以蔽之，曰：思无邪, Shi sanbai, yi yan yi bi zhi, yue: si wu xie). This Confucian canonization of the Shijing established the principle that poetry was not merely an aesthetic pleasure but a moral and a social institution — a vehicle for the expression of virtuous sentiments, a medium for the communication of political advice and social criticism, and a means by which the ruler could gauge the sentiments of the people and the health of the body politic. This didactic and political understanding of poetry — which coexisted throughout Chinese history with a purely aesthetic understanding — would exert a profound influence on the development of the Chinese poetic tradition, shaping not only the way poetry was read and interpreted but also the way it was written and the purposes for which it was employed.
3. The Chuci and the Southern Lyric Tradition
The second great foundational text of the Chinese poetic tradition is the Chuci (楚辞, Elegies of Chu or Songs of the South), a collection of poems associated with the southern state of Chu and with the figure of Qu Yuan (屈原, c. 340–278 BCE), the first Chinese poet known by name. If the Shijing represents the northern, Confucian, communal, and politically engaged strand of the Chinese poetic tradition, the Chuci represents the southern, shamanistic, individual, and emotionally expressive strand — a complementary tradition that is equally important to the subsequent development of Chinese poetry.
The Lisao (离骚, Encountering Sorrow), the longest and the most celebrated poem in the Chuci, is traditionally attributed to Qu Yuan himself and is read as an autobiographical account of the poet's unjust banishment from the court of Chu and his subsequent spiritual journey through the realms of myth and fantasy. The poem is a work of extraordinary imaginative power — a visionary odyssey through a landscape of gods, goddesses, shamans, and supernatural beings that draws on the rich mythological traditions of the Chu region — and it is also a work of profound emotional intensity, expressing the poet's grief, his indignation, and his unshakable commitment to virtue and to the good of his country with a passion that has moved Chinese readers for more than two thousand years.
The Chuci introduced several innovations that would prove enormously influential in the subsequent history of Chinese poetry. First, it introduced the figure of the individual poet — the poet as a named, historical person whose poems are the expression of his unique personality, his unique experiences, and his unique vision of the world. This conception of the poet as an individual — rather than as the anonymous voice of a community or a tradition — would become one of the defining features of the Chinese poetic tradition and would provide the foundation for the lyric poetry of the Tang, Song, and later dynasties. Second, the Chuci introduced a new verse form — the irregular, long-lined verse of the sao (骚) style, which used the modal particle xi (兮) as a rhythmic marker — that was freer and more expansive than the four-character verse of the Shijing and that could accommodate the expression of more complex and more intense emotions. Third, the Chuci established the tradition of allegorical reading — the interpretation of poetic imagery (particularly the imagery of beautiful women, fragrant plants, and the poet's loyal service to the ruler) as political allegory — that would become one of the most important hermeneutic principles of the Chinese poetic tradition.
4. Han Dynasty Poetry and the Emergence of the Five-Character Line
The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) saw the development of several important new poetic forms that would shape the subsequent history of Chinese poetry. The fu (赋, "rhapsody" or "rhyme-prose") — an elaborate, descriptive, and often encyclopedic literary form that combined prose and verse, description and narration, realism and fantasy — was the dominant literary form of the Han court. The great Han fu — such as Sima Xiangru's (司马相如, 179–117 BCE) "Rhapsody on the Shanglin Park" (上林赋, Shanglin fu) and Ban Gu's (班固, 32–92 CE) "Rhapsodies on the Two Capitals" (两都赋, Liangdu fu) — were works of dazzling verbal virtuosity and encyclopedic scope that celebrated the splendor of the Han empire and its capital cities. But the fu, for all its brilliance, was a court form — a literary performance designed to impress the emperor and his courtiers — and it was the more intimate and more personal five-character poetry (五言诗, wuyan shi) that would prove to be the more enduring and the more influential poetic form.
The Nineteen Old Poems (古诗十九首, Gushi shijiu shou), a collection of anonymous five-character poems that were probably composed in the late second century CE and that were included in the sixth-century anthology Wenxuan (文选, Literary Selections), are among the finest and the most influential poems in the Chinese literary tradition. These poems — which express the emotions of separation, loneliness, the passage of time, and the brevity of human life with an understated lyricism and a melancholy beauty that are quintessentially Chinese — established the five-character line as the principal vehicle for lyric expression in Chinese poetry. The five-character line — with its alternation of two-character and three-character phrases, creating a rhythmic pattern that is both balanced and subtly asymmetrical — proved to be an extraordinarily versatile and expressive verse form, capable of accommodating everything from the most intimate personal emotions to the most expansive descriptions of landscape and history.
The emergence of the five-character line also established the principle that would govern the formal evolution of Chinese poetry for the next thousand years: the principle that each major period in the history of Chinese poetry is associated with a particular verse form that is especially suited to the sensibility and the concerns of that period. The four-character line of the Shijing, the irregular verse of the Chuci, the five-character line of the Han and the Six Dynasties — each of these forms represented not merely a technical innovation but a new mode of poetic consciousness, a new way of organizing the relationship between language and experience.
5. The Six Dynasties: Literary Self-Consciousness and the Aesthetics of Beauty
The period of the Six Dynasties (220–589 CE) — the long era of political fragmentation and social turmoil that followed the collapse of the Han dynasty — was one of the most important periods in the history of Chinese poetry. It was during this period that poetry became, for the first time, a self-conscious literary art — an art that was practiced and appreciated not merely for its moral or social utility but for its aesthetic qualities, its formal beauty, and its capacity to express the most subtle and the most complex human emotions.
The poets of the Six Dynasties — including Cao Cao (曹操, 155–220), Cao Zhi (曹植, 192–232), Ruan Ji (阮籍, 210–263), Ji Kang (嵇康, 223–263), Tao Yuanming (陶渊明, 365–427), and Xie Lingyun (谢灵运, 385–433) — explored a wider range of themes and a wider range of tonal registers than their Han predecessors. Tao Yuanming, who is often regarded as the greatest poet of the Six Dynasties and one of the greatest poets in the Chinese tradition, created a poetry of rural retirement — a poetry that celebrated the simple pleasures of farming, drinking wine, reading, and contemplating the natural world — that was deceptively simple in its language but profoundly philosophical in its implications. Tao Yuanming's poetry established the ideal of the poet as a man of integrity who refuses to compromise his principles for worldly success and who finds in the natural world and in the rhythms of rural life a source of meaning and fulfillment that the corrupt and competitive world of officialdom cannot provide.
Xie Lingyun, by contrast, created a poetry of landscape description — "mountains and waters poetry" (山水诗, shanshui shi) — that was characterized by a meticulous attention to the visual details of the natural world and by a virtuosic command of language that was unprecedented in the Chinese poetic tradition. Xie Lingyun's landscape poetry established a tradition that would be taken up and developed by the great Tang and Song landscape poets and that would become one of the most characteristic and most admired modes of Chinese poetic expression.
The Six Dynasties also saw the development of the yongwu (咏物, "singing of things") tradition — poems that took a single object (a flower, a bird, a precious stone, a musical instrument) as their subject and that explored the aesthetic, symbolic, and philosophical implications of that object with a focused intensity that anticipated the imagist poetry of the twentieth-century West.[2]
6. Tang Poetry: The Golden Age
The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) is universally regarded as the golden age of Chinese poetry — the period in which the Chinese poetic tradition reached its fullest development and produced its greatest masterpieces. The extraordinary flowering of poetry during the Tang dynasty was the product of a unique combination of factors: the political stability and the cultural confidence of a powerful and prosperous empire; the development of the civil service examination system, which made poetic composition a prerequisite for political advancement and which ensured that the educated elite of the empire were also trained poets; the cosmopolitan openness of Tang culture, which absorbed and assimilated influences from Central Asia, India, Persia, and other civilizations along the Silk Road; and the culmination of the formal and the technical developments of the preceding centuries, which provided Tang poets with an extraordinarily rich and versatile set of poetic tools.
The most important formal innovation of the Tang period was the development of lüshi (律诗, "regulated verse") — a highly formalized verse form that imposed strict rules of tonal patterning, verbal parallelism, and structural organization on the traditional five-character and seven-character line. The regulated verse — which typically consisted of eight lines organized into four couplets (opening, parallel, parallel, closing), with each couplet following prescribed patterns of tonal alternation and with the two middle couplets required to exhibit strict verbal parallelism — represented the most exacting and the most technically demanding verse form in the Chinese poetic tradition. The mastery of regulated verse required not only a profound knowledge of the Chinese language and its tonal system but also an ability to think in parallel structures — to perceive and to express the correspondences and the contrasts that exist within the natural world and within human experience — that was itself a form of philosophical and aesthetic insight.
The three poets who are universally regarded as the supreme masters of Tang poetry — and, by extension, of the entire Chinese poetic tradition — are Li Bai (李白, 701–762), Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770), and Wang Wei (王维, 699–759). Li Bai, the "Immortal of Poetry" (诗仙, shixian), was a poet of dazzling imaginative power and lyric spontaneity, whose poetry — characterized by its boldness of imagery, its freedom of form, and its celebration of wine, friendship, the natural world, and the transcendent possibilities of the human spirit — embodied the ideal of the inspired, unconventional genius who creates effortlessly, as if by divine inspiration. Du Fu, the "Sage of Poetry" (诗圣, shisheng), was a poet of unparalleled depth and range, whose poetry — characterized by its moral seriousness, its technical mastery, its emotional complexity, and its unflinching engagement with the suffering and the injustice of the human world — embodied the ideal of the conscientious and compassionate poet who bears witness to the tragedies of his time and who speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. Wang Wei, the "Buddha of Poetry" (诗佛, shifo), was a poet of exquisite refinement and spiritual depth, whose landscape poetry — characterized by its visual precision, its meditative calm, and its evocation of a natural world that is luminous with spiritual significance — embodied the ideal of the poet as contemplative artist whose work reveals the hidden harmonies of the universe.
The complementary genius of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei established a range of poetic possibility that subsequent Chinese poets would explore, extend, and recombine but would never surpass. Every subsequent Chinese poet — from the late Tang to the present day — has worked in the shadow of these three masters, and the history of Chinese poetry after the Tang can be understood, in significant part, as a series of responses to the challenge that they posed: the challenge of creating poetry that is worthy of comparison with the greatest poetry that the Chinese language has ever produced.[3]
7. Song Ci: Poetry as Music, Music as Poetry
The Song dynasty (960–1279) saw the development of a new poetic form — the ci (词, "lyric" or "song lyric") — that represented a significant departure from the shi poetry of the Tang and that would become one of the most important and most characteristic forms of Chinese poetic expression. The ci was, in origin, a form of song lyric — a text written to be sung to a pre-existing musical melody or "tune pattern" (词牌, cipai). Each tune pattern had a fixed structure — a fixed number of lines, a fixed number of syllables in each line, a fixed tonal pattern, and a fixed rhyme scheme — and the poet's task was to compose a text that conformed to the requirements of the tune pattern while also achieving literary distinction. The relationship between the ci poet and the tune pattern was analogous to the relationship between a Western composer and a musical form (sonata, fugue, rondo): the form provided a structure and a set of constraints within which the poet exercised his creative imagination.
The ci form originated in the popular song culture of the late Tang and the Five Dynasties period (907–960), and its early practitioners — including Wen Tingyun (温庭筠, c. 812–c. 870) and Li Yu (李煜, 937–978), the "last ruler of the Southern Tang" — established the thematic and the tonal conventions of the form. The early ci was predominantly a poetry of the boudoir and the banquet hall — a poetry of love, longing, separation, and the transient pleasures of beauty and music — and it was characterized by a tone of delicate melancholy and a diction of sensuous refinement that distinguished it from the more elevated and more public tone of shi poetry.
In the Song dynasty, the ci form was developed and transformed by a series of great poets who expanded its thematic range, deepened its emotional and intellectual content, and elevated it to a status equal to that of shi poetry. Liu Yong (柳永, c. 987–1053) expanded the formal range of the ci by developing the "slow" or "long" ci (慢词, manci) — extended lyrics with more complex structures — and by bringing to the form a colloquial directness and an emotional candor that were new to Chinese lyric poetry. Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), the greatest literary genius of the Song dynasty, transformed the ci from a specialized form of amorous or elegiac poetry into a vehicle for the full range of human thought and feeling — writing ci poems on philosophical, political, historical, and autobiographical subjects with a freedom and an intellectual energy that broke through the conventional boundaries of the form and that established the "bold and unrestrained" (豪放, haofang) school of ci poetry.
Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084–c. 1155), who is widely regarded as the greatest female poet in the Chinese literary tradition, brought to the ci form a combination of emotional authenticity, intellectual precision, and formal perfection that has rarely been equaled. Her early ci — written during the period of her happy marriage to the scholar-official Zhao Mingcheng — depicted the pleasures and the intimacies of domestic life with a freshness and a sensory vividness that were unprecedented in Chinese poetry. Her later ci — written after the death of her husband and the loss of her home in the chaos of the Jin invasion — expressed the grief, the loneliness, and the desolation of a woman who had lost everything with an emotional power and an artistic mastery that have made her one of the most beloved poets in the Chinese literary tradition.
Xin Qiji (辛弃疾, 1140–1207), the great patriotic poet of the Southern Song, brought to the ci form a martial energy and a political passion that reflected the experience of a soldier and a statesman who had fought against the Jin invaders and who was consumed by the desire to recover the lost territories of the north. Xin Qiji's ci — which drew on the full resources of classical Chinese learning, incorporating allusions to the Shijing, the Chuci, the historical records, and the philosophical classics — were works of extraordinary intellectual density and emotional intensity that expanded the possibilities of the ci form to their fullest extent.
8. Yuan Qu and the Poetic Drama
The Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) saw the development of another new poetic form — the qu (曲, "aria" or "dramatic song") — that was closely associated with the flourishing of Chinese drama during this period. The qu form, like the ci, was a form of song lyric that was written to be sung to pre-existing musical melodies, but it differed from the ci in several important respects: it used a different set of tune patterns that were derived from the musical traditions of the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty (including elements borrowed from Central Asian and other non-Han musical traditions); it allowed greater freedom in the use of colloquial language and vernacular expressions; and it could incorporate "padding words" (衬字, chenzi) — extra syllables that were added to the basic metrical structure for emphasis, rhythmic variety, or colloquial flavor.
The sanqu (散曲, "individual arias") — stand-alone lyric poems in the qu form that were not part of a dramatic work — became an important poetic genre in its own right during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. The great sanqu poets — including Ma Zhiyuan (马致远, c. 1250–c. 1321), whose tiny poem "Autumn Thoughts" (天净沙·秋思, Tianjingsha · Qiusi) — four lines of images culminating in the line "A heartbroken man at the edge of the world" (断肠人在天涯, duanchang ren zai tianya) — is one of the most frequently quoted poems in the Chinese literary tradition, and Guan Hanqing (关汉卿, c. 1220–c. 1300), whose sanqu poems displayed a colloquial vitality and a defiant individualism — created a body of lyric poetry that was distinctive in its directness, its humor, and its engagement with the realities of everyday life.
The evolution from shi to ci to qu — from the relatively formal and elevated poetry of the Tang to the more intimate and more musical poetry of the Song to the more colloquial and more dramatically inflected poetry of the Yuan — represents a broad historical movement toward greater informality, greater expressiveness, and greater engagement with the spoken language and the popular culture of the time. This movement can be understood as a dialectic between classical constraint and vernacular freedom — a dialectic that would continue to shape the development of Chinese poetry through the Ming, Qing, and modern periods.
9. Poetry and Painting, Poetry and Music
One of the most distinctive and most important features of the Chinese poetic tradition is its intimate relationship with the other arts — particularly with painting and with music. The interrelationship of poetry, painting, and calligraphy — the "three perfections" (三绝, sanjue) of the Chinese artistic tradition — is a phenomenon that has no precise parallel in the Western aesthetic tradition and that reflects a set of aesthetic assumptions and cultural practices that are distinctively Chinese.
The relationship between poetry and painting in the Chinese tradition was classically articulated by Su Shi, who wrote of the Tang poet-painter Wang Wei: "When one contemplates his poems, there is painting within them; when one contemplates his paintings, there is poetry within them" (味摩诘之诗，诗中有画；观摩诘之画，画中有诗, wei Mojie zhi shi, shi zhong you hua; guan Mojie zhi hua, hua zhong you shi). This dictum — which has become one of the most famous and most frequently cited formulations in Chinese aesthetics — expresses the ideal of a union of the verbal and the visual arts in which each art form enriches and completes the other.
The practice of inscribing poems on paintings (题画诗, tihua shi) — and, conversely, of illustrating poems with paintings — was a central feature of the Chinese artistic tradition from the Song dynasty onward. The Chinese literati painting (文人画, wenren hua) tradition, which was developed by Su Shi and his circle in the Northern Song and which became the dominant tradition of Chinese painting, was premised on the idea that painting was not a craft to be practiced by professional artisans but a form of personal expression that was continuous with the other expressive arts of the literati — poetry, calligraphy, and essay writing. The literati painter was expected to be a poet and a calligrapher as well as a painter, and the painting itself was expected to combine visual imagery with poetic inscription and calligraphic brushwork in a unified artistic whole.
The relationship between poetry and music in the Chinese tradition is equally deep and equally complex. The Shijing was, in its original form, a collection of songs — poems that were sung, accompanied by musical instruments, at court ceremonies and popular festivals. The ci form of the Song dynasty and the qu form of the Yuan dynasty were explicitly musical forms — forms of song lyric that were written to be sung to pre-existing melodies. Even shi poetry, which was not formally associated with music, was deeply shaped by musical principles — the tonal patterning of regulated verse, with its alternation of level (平, ping) and oblique (仄, ze) tones, was a form of musical organization that gave each poem a distinctive tonal melody.
The gradual separation of poetry from music — which began in the Song dynasty, when ci poems began to be read as literary texts rather than performed as songs, and which was completed in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the musical settings of most ci and qu tune patterns had been lost — represents one of the most significant transformations in the history of Chinese poetry. The loss of the musical dimension deprived Chinese poetry of one of its most important aesthetic resources but also freed it to develop new modes of purely verbal music — the music of rhythm, rhyme, tone, and the sonic textures of the Chinese language itself.
10. Classical Poetry in the Ming, Qing, and Modern Periods
The history of Chinese poetry from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the present is, in significant part, a history of the ongoing vitality and the continuous transformation of the classical poetic tradition — the tradition of shi and ci poetry that was inherited from the Tang and Song masters and that continued to be practiced, with varying degrees of originality and distinction, by Chinese poets throughout the subsequent centuries.
The Ming and Qing dynasties produced a vast quantity of classical-style poetry — far more, in sheer volume, than the Tang and Song dynasties — but the relationship of Ming and Qing poets to the classical tradition was necessarily different from the relationship of the Tang and Song masters to their predecessors. The Tang and Song poets were creating the classical tradition; the Ming and Qing poets were inheriting it, interpreting it, and finding ways to speak in their own voices within the frameworks that had been established by their predecessors. The tension between veneration for the classical models and the desire to achieve individual artistic expression is one of the defining features of Ming and Qing poetry and one of the central concerns of Ming and Qing poetic criticism.
In the Qing dynasty, the classical poetic tradition produced several poets of the first rank — including Wang Shizhen (王士禛, 1634–1711), whose theory of shenyun (神韵, "spiritual resonance") emphasized the suggestive and the ineffable qualities of poetry; Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798), whose theory of xingling (性灵, "innate sensibility") championed the expression of genuine personal feeling and resisted the imitation of ancient models; and Gong Zizhen (龚自珍, 1792–1841), whose poetry combined classical learning with a passionate engagement with the social and political crises of his time and anticipated the reformist spirit of the late Qing era.
The survival and the continued vitality of classical-style Chinese poetry into the modern and contemporary periods is one of the most remarkable — and most underappreciated — features of the Chinese literary landscape. The May Fourth literary revolution of the 1910s and 1920s, which championed the use of the vernacular language (白话, baihua) and which promoted "new poetry" (新诗, xinshi) written in free verse as the poetic form appropriate to the modern age, was expected by many to consign classical-style poetry to the dustbin of history. But this expectation proved premature. Classical-style poetry — shi, ci, and qu in their traditional forms — continued to be written throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, not only by elderly scholars who had been trained in the classical tradition but also by younger writers who found in the classical forms a precision, a compression, and a musical beauty that the freer forms of new poetry could not always match.
Mao Zedong (毛泽东, 1893–1976) himself was a classical-style poet of considerable accomplishment, and his poems — written in the ci form and characterized by a grandeur of vision and a boldness of imagery that reflected his political ambitions and his sense of historical destiny — were among the most widely read and most frequently cited poems in twentieth-century China. The continued production and appreciation of classical-style poetry in contemporary China — where millions of people compose, recite, and share classical poems through online platforms and social media — demonstrates that the classical poetic tradition is not a museum piece but a living art form that continues to evolve and to engage new audiences.[4]
11. New Poetry: From the May Fourth Revolution to the Contemporary Avant-Garde
The "new poetry" (新诗, xinshi) movement that emerged in the wake of the May Fourth literary revolution represented the most radical transformation in the formal history of Chinese poetry since the emergence of the five-character line in the Han dynasty. The new poetry — which was written in the vernacular language, which abandoned the traditional tonal and metrical patterns, and which adopted the free verse forms that had been developed by Western poets (particularly the French Symbolists, the Anglo-American Imagists, and the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century) — was not merely a formal innovation; it was a revolution in the very conception of what Chinese poetry could be and what it should do.
The early practitioners of new poetry — including Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962), whose Experiments (尝试集, Changshi ji, 1920) was the first published collection of new poetry, and Guo Moruo (郭沫若, 1892–1978), whose The Goddesses (女神, Nüshen, 1921) was a passionate and formally exuberant collection that drew on the traditions of Whitman and Shelley — demonstrated both the possibilities and the difficulties of the new form. The early new poetry was often criticized — by traditionalists who regarded it as a degradation of the Chinese poetic tradition and by modernists who felt that it had not yet found its own distinctive voice — for its prosiness, its emotional extravagance, and its dependence on Western models.
It was in the work of the poets of the 1930s and 1940s — particularly Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950), whose delicate, melancholy lyrics drew on the French Symbolist tradition; Bian Zhilin (卞之琳, 1910–2000), whose intellectually complex and formally compressed poetry was influenced by T. S. Eliot and the French metaphysical tradition; Feng Zhi (冯至, 1905–1993), whose Sonnets (十四行集, Shisi hang ji, 1942) demonstrated that Western verse forms could be naturalized in Chinese; and Mu Dan (穆旦, 1918–1977), whose passionate and anguished poetry drew on the traditions of Yeats, Auden, and Eliot — that new poetry began to achieve a formal and emotional maturity that was worthy of comparison with the achievements of the classical tradition.
The history of new poetry in the People's Republic of China, in Taiwan, and in the Chinese diaspora after 1949 is a complex and multifaceted story that has been traced in earlier chapters. In the PRC, the "Misty" or "Obscure" poetry (朦胧诗, Menglong shi) movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s — led by Bei Dao (北岛, born 1949), Shu Ting (舒婷, born 1952), Gu Cheng (顾城, 1956–1993), and Yang Lian (杨炼, born 1955) — represented a breakthrough in Chinese poetic expression, using ambiguity, symbolism, and personal vision to challenge the political orthodoxies that had constrained Chinese poetry for decades. The subsequent generation of avant-garde poets — including Haizi (海子, 1964–1989), Xi Chuan (西川, born 1963), Ouyang Jianghe (欧阳江河, born 1956), and Zhai Yongming (翟永明, born 1955) — pushed the boundaries of Chinese poetry in new directions, exploring the possibilities of language poetry, long-form experimental poetry, and feminist poetry.
In Taiwan, the modernist poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s — led by Ji Xian, Yu Guangzhong, Luo Fu, and others — and the subsequent nativist reaction created a poetic tradition of extraordinary richness and diversity. The contemporary poetry scene in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora continues to produce work that is formally innovative and intellectually ambitious, and that draws on both the classical Chinese poetic tradition and the traditions of Western and world poetry.
12. The Persistence of Poetry: Chinese Poetry in the Twenty-First Century
The vitality of the Chinese poetic tradition in the twenty-first century — a century in which poetry has been widely declared to be marginal or irrelevant in much of the Western world — is one of the most striking features of the contemporary Chinese cultural landscape. Poetry continues to occupy a central position in Chinese cultural life — not only in the rarefied world of literary journals and university seminars, but also in the everyday lives of millions of Chinese people who read, write, memorize, and share poems as a natural and integral part of their cultural experience.
The popularity of television programs such as the Chinese Poetry Conference (中国诗词大会, Zhongguo shici dahui), which has attracted hundreds of millions of viewers since its debut in 2016, and the proliferation of online poetry communities, poetry apps, and poetry social media accounts demonstrate that the appetite for poetry in contemporary China is not diminishing but growing — and that the audience for poetry encompasses not only the literary elite but also ordinary people of all ages and all social backgrounds. The poems that circulate most widely in these contexts are, for the most part, classical poems — the poems of the Shijing, of Li Bai and Du Fu, of Su Shi and Li Qingzhao — but contemporary poetry, both classical-style and new-style, also reaches large audiences through these channels.
The Chinese poetic tradition, as it enters the twenty-first century, thus presents a paradox: it is a tradition that is at once ancient and modern, classical and contemporary, elite and popular. The poems of the Shijing, composed nearly three thousand years ago, continue to be read and recited by millions of Chinese people; the regulated verse forms of the Tang dynasty continue to be composed by poets who are also comfortable with the free verse forms of the modern West; and the ancient belief in the power of poetry to give form to human feeling, to illuminate the natural world, and to connect the individual to the larger community of human beings who have lived and suffered and loved and died continues to animate the practice of poetry in China.
13. Chinese Poetry in World Perspective
The Chinese poetic tradition, viewed in the context of the world's other great poetic traditions, is distinguished by several features that are, if not unique, then at least exceptionally prominent. The first is its extraordinary continuity — a continuity that extends over nearly three thousand years and that connects the folk songs of the Zhou dynasty to the digital poetry of the present day in an unbroken chain of formal, thematic, and aesthetic development. No other poetic tradition in the world can claim a comparable degree of continuity; even the great traditions of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian poetry, while they are equally ancient, have undergone more radical breaks and discontinuities in their development.
The second distinguishing feature of the Chinese poetic tradition is the centrality of the natural world as a poetic subject and a poetic symbol. Chinese poetry, from the Shijing to the present, has been deeply attentive to the natural world — to the beauty of mountains and rivers, the changing of the seasons, the behavior of birds and animals, the growth and the decay of plants — and has used the imagery of the natural world not merely as decoration or illustration but as a fundamental mode of understanding and expressing human experience. This intimacy with the natural world gives Chinese poetry a quality of ecological awareness and environmental sensitivity that is increasingly relevant in an age of climate change and environmental crisis.
The third distinguishing feature is the compression and the suggestiveness of Chinese poetic language. The classical Chinese language — with its absence of grammatical inflection, its tolerance of syntactic ambiguity, its rich system of tonal distinctions, and its enormous vocabulary of literary and cultural allusions — is a language that is extraordinarily well suited to the creation of poetry that is dense, compact, and multiply meaningful. A single line of classical Chinese poetry can contain levels of meaning — semantic, tonal, visual, allusive, and symbolic — that would require several lines of translation in any Western language to convey, and it is this density and suggestiveness of Chinese poetic language that has fascinated and inspired Western poets from Ezra Pound to Gary Snyder.
The influence of Chinese poetry on Western poetry — which began in the early twentieth century with the Imagist movement and which has continued, in various forms, to the present day — is one of the most important and most productive instances of cross-cultural literary influence in modern literary history. Pound's Cathay (1915), a collection of translations and adaptations of Chinese poems that were based on the notes of the sinologist Ernest Fenollosa, was one of the most influential books of poetry of the twentieth century — not because its translations were accurate (they were not) but because they demonstrated to Western poets the possibilities of a poetic language that was concrete, imagistic, and emotionally restrained, and that achieved its effects not through explicit statement but through the juxtaposition of images and the suggestive power of silence and omission. The influence of Chinese poetry on the work of Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and other American poets of the twentieth century contributed to a fundamental transformation of American poetic practice and demonstrated that the Chinese poetic tradition had something to offer not only to Chinese readers but to readers and writers throughout the world.[5]
References
- ↑ Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 1–30; Zong-qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1–20.
- ↑ Xiaofei Tian, Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 1–40; Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1:195–260.
- ↑ Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1–40; David Hinton, Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 119–250.
- ↑ Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2:1–100; Michel Hockx, A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity (Leiden: CNWS, 1994), 1–30.
- ↑ Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1–40; Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New York: New Directions, 2003), ix–xxviii.