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Pengfei Wang English Metaphysical and Mid-Late Tang Poetry: A Baroque Comparison by Pengfei Wang A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Comparative Literature University of Alberta © Pengfei Wang, 2018 Abstract English Metaphysical and Mid-Late Tang Poetry: A Baroque Comparison As the title indicates, the thesis is a comparative analysis of the Metaphysical poets and Mid- late Tang poets, under the general style of the Baroque. The scholarship on this topic is very minimal because only recently with the study of James Liu on Li Shangyin and the Baroque we have learned to think of Tang poets as Baroque poets. The same goes for the Metaphysical poets who were so-called by Dr. Johnson but who can also be grouped under the Baroque, because they are seventeenth century poets. My definition of Baroque, however, does not conform to that of James Liu who uses the term historically, and by comparing “baroque” terms that metaphysical poets have in common with Tang poets. My concept of baroque is based on Nietzsche’s definition of “baroque” as a poetic ”style” that can be found in any period, and in any place and any country: in the West as well as in the East, in England and in China. Nietzsche’s definition of baroque is associated with a notion of art as allegory which is in opposition to traditional poetic, forms that that are defined as symbolic. According to Nietzsche, we have allegorical, or Baroque poetry, when traditional, symbolic forms are disrupted or are in decline. An analysis of Baroque poetry, therefore, cannot be based on a symbolic approach but on an allegorical reading that is attentive at the ways in which the poetry is displaced from traditional forms. The three metaphysical poets I have chosen are John Donne, Andrew Marvell and John Crashaw and for each poet I discuss three of their poems. For the Mid-late Tang poets I have chosen three poems of Meng Jiao, Li He and Li Shangyin. The thesis is divided in an Introduction, a first chapter on Metaphysical poets, a second chapter on Mid-late Tang poets, the third chapter is on a comparative analysis of Metaphysical and Mid-late Tang conceits. A brief conclusion and a Bibliography conclude the thesis. ii Acknowledgements My most sincere gratitude goes first to the China Scholarship Council who makes it possible for tens of thousands of young people from poor families like me to pursue their postgraduate degree abroad. Without its generous sponsorship, I would not be able to dream a five-year-long PhD study in University of Alberta, Canada. When I started out on this thesis, comparing English and Chinese Baroque, I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. I would have probably gone the way of Tak-wai Wong and James Liu, that is, the wrong way. That I did not commit the same mistakes I owe it to my supervisor, professor Massimo Verdicchio, who not only steered me on the right path but also made available to me his own work on Li Shangyin and the Baroque, and on Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics. I have also learned a lot from his mentor, Paul de Man, whose definition of modernity seems very acceptable to me. All these readings have served me well in understanding Chinese poetry as Baroque rather than literally, as I would have done. My debt of gratitude also goes to the members of my supervisory committee: Professors Sathya Rao and Waclaw Osadnik, to Raleigh Whitinger, a committee member, and, of course, to the external. My thanks also to Irene Sywenky who kindly agreed to Chair the exam. I also like to thank Professors Jean Debernardi and David Gay who were, initially, on the supervisory committee. I am very grateful for their contribution. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Graduate Chair of MLCS, Micah True, and Andrea Hayes, for their help and support during the process of getting the thesis approved. Thank you all! iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 English Metaphysical poetry ........................................................................................ 14 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 14 John Donne or The Erotic and the Divine. ............................................................................ 15 Andrew Marvell: Between Eros and Thanatos. .................................................................... 26 Richard Crashaw or Eros and Ecstasy. .................................................................................. 40 Chapter 2 Mid-Late Tang Baroque Poetry.................................................................................... 60 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 60 Meng Jiao and Benjaminian Allegory. .................................................................................. 61 Li He or Irony and the Lyric .................................................................................................. 80 Li Shangyin: Envisioning Allusion as Disruption. .............................................................. 102 Chapter 3 Comparing Metaphysical and Mid-Late Tang conceits ............................................. 124 The Conceit in English Metaphysical Poetry. ..................................................................... 124 The Conceit in Mid-Late Tang Poetry ................................................................................. 131 iv Conceits of English Metaphysical Poetry ............................................................................ 136 Conceits of Mid-Late Tang Poetry ...................................................................................... 146 Comparing English Metaphysical and Mid-Late Tang Poetry ............................................ 153 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................. 157 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 160 v Introduction Don’t reproach us our lack of clarity because this is what we do. (Pascal) A comparison between English Metaphysical and Mid-late Tang Poetry is only possible if we understand by Baroque a poetic style that occurs in opposition to traditional, mimetic or symbolic forms of art. This definition, which comes from Nietzsche, describes the Baroque, which is usually associated with the arts and poetry of the seventeenth century, as a style that can occur in any period and in any place whether in England or in ninth-century China. Nietzsche writes that the Baroque style emerges when “any great art starts to fade, whenever the demands in the art of classic expression grow too great.”1 He gives the example of Michelangelo, whom he calls the father or grandfather of Italian baroque, and the artist who broke from the artistic mold of classical rules of art. The baroque style may lack the nobility we confer on the symbol and on symbolic representations, nonetheless, it is always to allegory that we turn to understand the artistic and the poetic; just as we turn to baroque poets to learn about our modernity, as I hope to show in my discussion of the English Metaphysical and Mid-late Tang poets. The Baroque does not belong solely to the seventeenth century in Europe or ends with it, as Benedetto Croce had hoped.2 The Baroque is not an artistic style that is determined by history or literary history. An historical approach brings about the repression of allegory in favor of a symbolic mode of art and poetry. The Baroque, when understood as allegory, has not fared too well with literary critics or philosophers. Benedetto Croce, the twentieth century Italian critic and philosopher, regarded the Italian seventeenth century as a “century without poetry” (un secolo senza poesia)”3 He also 1 denied that the Baroque can be found in any century and in any place. He claimed that the Baroque, and allegory, had ended with the seventeenth century and that we had done with them. For Croce, Baroque poetry as allegorical poetry is not artistic, because only the symbol is artistic. Allegory, on the contrary, is the non-artistic, the anti-artistic, and should be avoided at all costs. Croce spent a lifetime expunging allegory from poetry, and separating it from the symbol, without much success.4 Croce’s notion of allegory came from Hegel who, in the Aesthetics identified the artistic with the symbol, and allegory as the non-artistic.5 Hegel defined allegory as “frostig und kahl,” (icy and bleak) and dismissed it as “a product of the intellect and not of concrete intuition and of the deep feeling of imagination, and lacking inherent seriousness, prosaic, and distant from art” (Hegel 501). Following Hegel, Croce wrote that “Allegory is not a direct form of spiritual expression, only a kind of writing or cryptography” (Croce’s La Poesia 227). Nonetheless, on a closer look, for both Hegel and Croce, allegory is, after all, the name of the artistic while the symbol is only apparently that.6 In Art criticism the Baroque is usually confused with Mannerism, an exaggeration of traits
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