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The Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century

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The Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century Learning to Write Naturally: the Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046571 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Learning to Write Naturally: The Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century A dissertation presented by Chen ZHANG to The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2017 © 2017 Chen Zhang All rights reserved. Stephen Owen Chen Zhang Learning to Write Naturally: The Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century Abstract I inquire into the nature of poetic experience by studying six leading poets in the late twelfth century. The questions they address with their prolific writing are also central to poetic (and literary) endeavors in general: what is the place of poetry among their political, intellectual, and cultural commitments; how to achieve individual freedom under a weighty textual tradition; and how to reconcile naturalness and craft, spontaneity and method. The poets reckoned with the changes in foundational concepts such as Nature, self, and vital force (qi) in the Neo-Confucian movement. They accepted the importance of studying ancient models, but rejected a difficult writing process in favor of spontaneity and speed. They were aware of the inherent contradiction between learning and spontaneity, and sported precarious solutions such as sunyata (“awakening,” borrowed from Chan Buddhism). The poets sketched scenes complete with image, feeling, and movement, in a smooth language with casual simplicity. They were also forming a theory on how to incorporate colloquial language into poetry, seeking to justify attention to the “common” (su) without impairing the “proper and elegant” (ya). The result was a peculiar blend of “new” language with the vocabulary and sentence patterns that echo past writing. I argue that they gave new meaning to the term shiren (poet), and that being a shiren in the late twelfth century meant a persistent, moment-by-moment engagement with the moving of inner sensibility through the taming of poetic language. iii Table of Contents 1. Title Page i 2. Copyright page ii 3. Abstract iii 4. Table of Contents iv 5. Front Matter Dedication vi Acknowledgement vii 6. Body of Text i. Introduction: The Problem of Southern Song Poetry 1 1) Introduction 2) Lodge: Phenomena and Words 3) Encounter: Humans and Phenomena 4) Barriers 5) The Problem of Southern Song Poetry 6) The Unreachable – A Conclusion ii. Chapter One: The Late-Twelfth-Century Poetry-Addict 49 1) The Long Introduction 2) Explaining Poetry 3) A Portrait of the Shiren 4) The Long Conclusion 5) The Short Conclusion iii. Chapter Two: Making the Best of Jiangxi: Yang Wanli, Han Biao and the 105 Regulated Poem 1) Introduction 2) From Yang Wanli to Han Biao 3) Conclusion v. Chapter Three: Quatrains Sets in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteen Centuries 159 1) Introduction: Asking the Questions and the Inevitable Flashback to Du Fu 2) Stylistic Expectations for the Quatrain in the Late Twelfth Century 3) Two Genres of Journal Quatrain Sets a) Travel Diary Quatrains: Poetry of Discovery b) Interlude: Solitary Musings over Solitary Musing Poems c) Moments-in-Leisure Quatrain Sets: The Building of a Poet’s Universe 4) Conclusion v. Chapter Four: Poetry of the Everyday and Every Day: The Unremarkable Poetic 248 Realm 1) Introduction: The One Lu You? 2) On Pervasive Qi and Complete Poetry iv 3) Resolving the Conflict between Vital Force and Poetry: The Unremarkable Poetic Realm 4) The Donkey-rider: Conclusion and Afterthought vi. The Conclusions 310 7. Bibliography 316 v to Xin Qiji poet and a good sport vi Acknowledgement It will take all 300 pages of this dissertation to complete my note of gratitude to my committee, Professors Stephen Owen, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian, for making it possible for me to finish this project. Only with the combination of inspiration, understanding, and guidance that they have provided over the years was I able to overcome the difficulties in thinking and writing. For one who must have been a very trying student, they were always there when I had questions or needed to talk over a point, and they remained warm and supportive through the end. A ship sailing over the smooth ocean guided by the bright pole star is a beautiful scene. I wish I could use it to describe the relationship between me, the ocean of learning, and my advisor, Professor Owen. Sadly, I have been more like a diver than a ship, a diver who was in constant danger of drowning. Or Du Fu’s broken boat. Or the stray migrating goose. Fortunately for me, Professor Owen has been every bit the pole star. He has a knack of pointing out the right direction, and he makes sure that I did not lose the light of my own inner star. I am indebted to Professor Michael Fuller from the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Shengli Feng from the Chinese University of Hong Kong for the generous use of their time in reading and talking over the later chapters. I am grateful to them for pushing me to think beyond my scope and to take on the hard questions. I fondly remember our dissertation group meetings, with Chengjuan Sun, Jinghua Wangling, Zeb Raft, Yue Hong, Jascha Smilack, Qiulei Hu, and Huicong Zhang. The early inspirations for this dissertation came from those meetings. To someone who pledged her soul at an early age to poetry, writing a dissertation on poetry was not working, but being and becoming. I thank Tsong-han Lee, both for his love and companionship in my growth through the first two chapters, and for the life lessons on loss and suffering, which enabled me to make the essential conceptual leap to write the rest. To my friends, Anne K. Ng, Shirley Liu, Seijeong Chin, Sukhee Lee, and Guanglin Liu, I owe heartfelt thanks for being there when the ground collapsed under my feet. They let me know that I was not alone, and it meant the world. I thank my parents for their understanding through the long hours when I retreated behind locked doors instead of doing the right thing of spending time with them. I have learned to better balance work and family, and they can expect to get more of their daughter in the future. My committee and mentors have gone over the drafts thoroughly, providing valuable feedback and suggestions, and I, in turn, have done my best to correct and improve. I take responsibility for the errors that remain, but Time, Miserly Graduate School Time, is solely responsible for the flaws. vii Introduction: The Problem of Southern Song Poetry A poem is the imprint of a chance encounter between human sensitivity and the world of phenomena captured in a distinct form of writing whose moving power predicates on unobstructed movement to and from the encounter core. The relationship between the spiritual content of poetry and poetic language is analogous to the way a liquid taking on the shape and color of the container vessel that it fills. A history of traditional Chinese poetry is the changing relationship that a constantly-reimagined human participant bears to the gradually densifying body of poetic language in the ongoing practice of poetry-writing – in the writer-subject’s efforts to overcome the latter’s constrictions, to subsume its semi-autonomous patterns in the realization of feeling without being subsumed in return. I. Introduction: After the rain, the foliage green forms a shade. 雨餘木葉綠成隂, One day of leisure is worth ten-thousand in gold. 一日身閒直萬金. 1 Dissatisfied with myself for not having eliminated all my habits: 習氣自嫌除未盡, Birds chirping and flowers falling still touch my heart. 鳥啼花落尚關心. -- Lu You 陸游, “Late Spring, Composed in the East Garden 晚春東園作.”1 When birds chirping and flowers falling touch the heart, we have the pre-text of a poem. This moment of encounter when the external world becomes relevant (“touches”) – when it moves (gan 感) or arouses (xing 興) the mind/heart – is the origin of poetry to which one may trace from the canonical statement that “poetry speaks of the resolve.” Liu Xie 劉勰 does exactly that in the “Elucidating Poetry” chapter in Wenxin Diaolong 文心雕龍, “Humans are endowed with the seven emotions; responding to phenomena they are moved. Moved by phenomena and chant out one’s resolve – there is nothing unnatural in this. 人稟七情, 應物斯感. 感物吟志, 莫 非自然.”2 Here, Liu Xie gives voice to the dominant conception of poetry in the tradition, that poetry is the product of an entirely natural process where qing – human’s innate capacity to emotions – is moved in response to the external world, and its movement becomes manifest in language. Conceiving of poetry as natural has not freed it from the inevitable questions of expression and presentation that arise as soon as it ends up in language, but it is important to set up in the beginning a pre-text Form of poetry – call it the Poetry of Encounter to distinguish it from the mimetic model – whose presumed immanence in poems of words on the one hand, and whose undefined relationship to them on the other, call for an experimental separation of the 1 Lu You, Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯, annot., Jiannan shigao jiaozhu 劍南詩稿校注, (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2005), 7:4175.
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