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The Field of Modern Lyric Classicism1

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The Field of Modern Lyric Classicism1 Front. Lit. Stud. China 2015, 9(4): 515−524 DOI 10.3868/s010-004-015-0030-0 PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS Jerry D. Schmidt The Field of Modern Lyric Classicism1 In the past few decades, the field of late Qing poetry has rapidly evolved and continues to grow in exciting new directions. Before turning to the history of recent developments in the field, I will briefly introduce my own experience in the field and how I first became interested in Qing verse. In high school, I taught myself German and, while I was not able to master German conversation, I did manage to learn how to read the language fairly well. My reading of German had a decisive influence on my future studies, because it exposed me to the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, the first time in my life when poetry began “speaking” to me. I originally thought about majoring in German in university, but before I graduated from high school I decided that I would first try out another, even more challenging, language, Chinese. Since I knew China had a long history, I thought that China might have some great poetry, too, and I have been busy with it ever since and hope to continue with it to my final day. How I Came to Study Later Chinese Poetry At first I thought that the task of studying Chinese poetry would be relatively easy, because most of my teachers at the University of California, Berkeley, assured me that there was really nothing much worth reading in the shi form of poetry after the Tang dynasty (618–907), and one even told me that the Chinese had written no interesting books after the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). At that time, however, I had the habit of wandering through the stacks of the UC Berkeley Chinese collection, and just by chance I happened upon an anthology of poetry in the shi form from the Song dynasty (960–1279), well beyond the end of 1 This paper was originally delivered as the keynote speech for the conference “Back into Modernity: Classical Poetry and Intellectual Transition in Modern China,” which took place in Frankfurt, Germany, in July 2014. It has now been reworked into a paper on the state of the field of modern Chinese literary studies. Jerry D. Schmidt ( ) The Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z2, Canada E-mail: [email protected] 516 Jerry D. Schmidt that form’s golden age, according to my first teacher. My teacher had told me that the only worthwhile verse from the Song dynasty was in the ci form, so at first I hesitated, but in the end I ignored his kind advice and checked the book out. Unfortunately, I was busy with classes for the rest of the day and only started reading it that evening. I was astounded by the poems included in the anthology, and I was completely unable to close my eyes until shortly before 11 o’clock the next morning. I had never been exposed to any poetry like this in my entire life, and I just could not keep myself from reading it. At that point I decided that I would continue to be just as polite to my teachers as I had been formerly but that I would never believe anything they told me, unless I had read the books they were discussing myself. The rest of my life has largely been an attempt to fulfill that promise, leading me to study Song dynasty poetry in the shi form first and then leap from the Song dynasty to China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). At the time I began studying later Chinese poetry, I was frequently made to feel that I was somewhat of an oddball. When Western and especially Chinese scholars and students asked me what I was doing research on, I told them that I was concentrating on Qing poetry, and either they looked totally mystified or they tried to convince me that if I was really interested in the Qing dynasty, I should switch into the study of that period’s vernacular novels. Although the situation is beginning to change rapidly in China now, last summer when I was in that country and told scholars that my last book was a study of the poet Zheng Zhen 鄭珍 (1806–64), they frequently had not even heard of an author whom the twentieth century poet and critic Zhao Xi 趙熙 (1867–1948) called “the greatest poet, Zheng Zhen, of the very first class” 絕代經巢第一流. Change in the Canon and German Parallels The main reason for the general ignorance of a great author like Zheng Zhen both inside and outside China is that the canon of Chinese literature underwent a drastic revision during the so-called May Fourth Movement of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and ever since then, the new canon has been promoted by the Chinese government and taught in all schools. Before this revision of the literary canon, most educated Chinese regarded shi poetry and wen or prose in the Classical Chinese language as the most significant Chinese literary forms. They read other forms of poetry, such as ci and qu, dramas, which are in a mixed vernacular and classical form, and even novels largely in the vernacular, but, for the most part, the status of these forms was significantly lower than that of shi and wen, the pre-twentieth-century critical literature on shi being immense compared to the rather meager literature about other forms. In spite of the situation at the .
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