CONCLUSION

I hope the reader will by now agree that Fanghui’s rewards close study, both for its own sake and as a starting point for reassessing the works of other poets—this despite the fact that all the poems from the last third of his life are no longer extant, making a complete picture of him forever beyond our reach. Although he stayed out of the spotlight shown on and the group of men closely associated with him, he was clearly part of the late eleventh-century po- etry world and was recognized for more than his lyrics. We have already seen ways in which Fanghui exemplifies certain traits that scholars have identified as “Song.” In trying to understand why he thought a given poem was interesting and worth keeping, I have pointed to its freshness and precision of description as a desideratum for Song poets.1 (In contrast, I have interpreted evident pleasure in pushing the meanings of words and gram- mar to the very limit of paraphrasable sense as a revival of “Tang” preoccupa- tions.) Various kinds of intellectual wit evident in He Zhu’s poems can be seen as typical of his age or, more precisely, of either Su Shi or . Such general remarks are useful up to a point, because they help explain what Fanghui and his audience valued. They also reassure us that neither Fanghui nor the “more important” poets were atypical; they represent variations on characteristic responses to life and to literary traditions. On the other hand, since these responses recur throughout the three hundred years of , we are still left with the task of discovering some line of chronological development within that span and Fanghui’s contribution to it. There have been promising attempts to associate literary change in the Song with changes in the perceived relationship between wen ֮ (culture/writing) and the moral development of the individual, the improvement of society as a whole, or both. Fanghui, who was above all a verbal artist much enamored of words and all their “colors,” surely was never persuaded by the argument made in some quarters that literary writing impeded the cultivation of the person. It is doubtful that he problematized the question, however. Regrettably, anything he might have written about the nature and value of literature has been lost along with nearly all of his prose and I find it difficult at the present state of my own

——— 1 “Precision of description” has to be understood relative to the Chinese tradition up to this time; English language landscape poetry typically strives for far more particularity. Chinese poets had little interest in describing all the visual details of a scene. Partly because of the concision achievable by Classical Chinese within the prosodic structure of traditional shi poetry, their em- phasis would generally be on implied meanings and associations. 454 CONCLUSION knowledge to use this gross thematic rubric to tease out any deeper meanings in his poetry. The organization of this book reflects my belief that another type of research has to be pursued further before we can write a more adequate history of Song poetry, or indeed of all post-Tang shi poetry. First, the chronological arrange- ment of the investigation within each of my chapters does more than remind us that a poet doesn’t “happen all at once,” despite the continuities we expect from a mature and active writer. While chronology encourages us to give due atten- tion to shifts in direction, interruptions, and bypaths in the works of a single person, we can also use it to bring to the fore similar explorations on the part of other poets working at roughly the same time. As we accumulate data, we can start to make historical hypotheses of great potential value. If we reduce each poet to one or two ideas or features that fit into a received narrative of literary development, we both efface the complexity of the individual poet and obscure other lines of development waiting to be discovered. Second, by devoting each of the six chapters in this book to one genre of shi, I suggest that at least some of these lines of development are to be found in the history of each genre. To put it another way, I think it might be fruitful to focus on these histories rather than the history of Song shi as a whole. Of course, it would be absurd to say genre has been totally neglected in previous studies. Lit- erary historians have traditionally noted that some poets favored such-and-such a genre or did their most characteristic work in a certain form; studies are even being done now on changing genre preferences during the lifetime of a single poet, notably Mo Lifeng’s work on Huang Tingjian, cited elsewhere in this book. The next step is to go beyond noting that ’s best poems are Ancient Verse, for example, and examine how his work in Regulated Verse or Quatrains did or did not advance those forms. When we better understand how genre ex- pectations from the Mei Yaochen generation were remolded in the hands of He Zhu and his contemporaries of similar stature, opening the way for younger po- ets, we will be much closer to writing a new history of Song Dynasty poetry as a whole. Let us review here how Fanghui’s work relates to the development of each genre as we understand it now and as we might like to probe it in the future. In Ancient Verse, there seem to have been few options for formal experimentation. The significance of He Zhu’s use of first-line rhyme (concentrated in 1080–86) is difficult to assess without comparison to the practice of other Song Dynasty poets; for the present, we can only say it is unusual in pentametrical poetry. Thematically, Fanghui innovated within categories already established by the late eleventh century. The fact that allegory seems to have become a problematic mode with him is consistent with what other scholars have noted in Huang Tingjian and Su Shi. Whether the theory of imitation we proposed for He Zhu’s