Sheng Tang Poetry. By Stephen Owen

Author: Yu Wenmo
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-12-01
Features: If we set aside the myth of the Tang Dynasty of Great Tang, we would find that Li Bai and Du Fu were not typical representatives of that era. Later readers often content themselves with the images of Li Bai and Du Fu—they are not only seen as the pinnacle of poetry but also as two opposing paradigms of poetic individuality. However, the background of contemporary poetry allows us to view Li Bai and Du Fu with a vastly different perspective, one that enables us to discern the essence and degree of their originality.
Preface to the English Edition of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry
The English editions of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry were published about a quarter of a century ago. At that time, the academic field of classical Chinese literature in China was quite different from what it is today. We had the basic raw materials, although Wang Ji’s five-volume collected poems were not published until 1987, a decade after the publication of Early Tang Poetry. Many annotated collections of poems had not yet appeared, and we also lacked the significant research on the lives of authors and the chronology of their poetry by scholars such as Fu Xuancong. Today, electronic literature has made the retrieval of words extremely easy, greatly facilitating research work—something that was unimaginable twenty-five years ago. Back then, we lacked the research tools we have now and had to rely on the academic achievements of the Qing and Republican periods. Most importantly, in the past twenty-five years, Chinese scholarship has made great strides, and the field of Tang studies has flourished, which is both gratifying and inspiring.
Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry have their limitations, errors, and shortcomings. If they could be rewritten, they would certainly be very different. Whether personally or in terms of the academic research I utilized and drew upon, much has changed. However, even after many years, I believe that some of the fundamental arguments in the books and the perspective they take on literary history still hold some validity.
Literary history is not the history of the famous. While literary history must include the famous, its most important role lies in understanding literary practices in flux, using contemporary literary practices as the context for understanding the famous. We should not make sweeping generalizations about a century-long period but should examine shorter periods, writer groups, and different regions. In this way, traditional academic research, such as studies of literary associations and chronologies, can be combined with literary history writing and theoretical research, thereby gaining new significance.
Literary history attempts to link specific details with an understanding of the whole, yet the complexity of the whole often reveals the inadequacy of simple generalizations. In the study of poetry, the sole purpose of academic work is to help us better understand specific poems. A good literary history always returns to the poems themselves, allowing us to clearly see the astonishing, beautiful, and bold creations of the poets.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Jia Jinhua, the translator of these two books: if Tsinghua University Press believes that these works are still worth republishing in China two and a half decades later, half of the credit goes to Professor Jia.
August 2004