chapter 2 A New Poetry Criticism: The Creation of “Remarks on Poetry”

In the last two years of his life, 1071–72, when he finally achieved his desire to retire from officialdom and settle on the bu- colic Ying River (in modern , ), Xiu compiled a small collection of anecdotes and observations about poetry that he dubbed Remarks on Poetry from the Retired Scholar with Six Single Things 六一詩話. “The Retired Scholar with Six Single Things” 六一居士 was the literary epithet he used widely in his final years and was intended to mark the importance of a few possessions in which Ouyang found humble pleasure at this late stage of his life: a zither, a chess set, a jug of wine, and, more expansively, his personal library and his large collection of rubbings of stone inscriptions. Ouyang himself, a solitary old man, is the sixth of these “single things.” Ouyang’s Remarks on Poetry seems at first sight to be a modest undertaking.1 It is short, consisting of but twenty-nine brief para-

————— 1. Neither Ouyang’s pioneering work in the “remarks on poetry” form nor the form itself has attracted much attention in English-language scholarship on Chinese literary criticism and poetics. The only full-length study of remarks on poetry to be undertaken to date is the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Hsu Hsiao-ching, “ ‘Talks on Poetry’ (shih-hua) as a Form of Sung Literary Criticism” (University of Wisconsin, 1991). The most useful discussion of Ouyang’s remarks on poetry, complete with a translation of most of its entries, is in Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 359–89. a new poetry criticism Y 61 graphs or entries that have no apparent relation to one another and no logical order. The tone is desultory and the topics uneven but tending toward the highly particular: lines from a recent but for- gotten poet are quoted; a joke that had been told about a childishly simple poem is related; the meaning of certain elusive lines is ex- plained; particular Tang poets are critiqued or contrasted; recent lines on ancient ruins around are evaluated; and so on. There is no apparent literary or ideological underpinning to the haphazard compilation. There is no preface identifying an intent or plan. There is only a brief one-line introductory note that tells us that in his retirement Ouyang “compiled the work to provide ma- terial for casual conversation” 集以資閒談. In a recently published edition of Ouyang Xiu’s complete works, the Remarks on Poetry occupies a tiny place and might easily be overlooked. It occupies thirteen pages out of 2,772.2 Such was the humble beginning of the remarks on poetry form. Ouyang himself would probably never have guessed that the form he created would in time grow to be the dominant form of literary criticism in imperial China. Certainly, during the Ming and Qing periods that is what remarks on poetry becomes; with hundreds of separate titles embodying the critical viewpoints and values of contending literary schools, it dwarfs any other mode of literary thought written in Chinese. The proliferation of the remarks on poetry form began soon after Ouyang’s effort and increased dramatically through the Southern Song dynasty. But even before the withdrawal southward, the ex- ample of what Ouyang had done attracted attention and inspired others to follow suit. Within a few years, two of Ouyang’s younger friends, 司馬光 and Liu Ban 劉攽, had each written his own remarks on poetry.3 Sima Guang even characterized his as a “continuation” of Ouyang’s, leaving no doubt where his inspiration lay. From this initial stage, in which we may say that the form was established, it grew rapidly. The idea of composing a remarks on

————— 2. Throughout, I refer to the text of Liuyi shihua in Ouyang Xiu quanji 128.1949–61. 3. Sima Guang’s work is Wengong xu shihua, and Liu Ban’s is Shanzhong shihua.