Pauline Yu, "Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry"

Du Fu 杜甫. It turns out that hundreds of years passed before he began to be seen as China's greatest poet. This shot is from his "thatch hut" in Sichuan, where you can take a tour for only 20 yuan.

Yu, Pauline. “Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 20 (1998): 71–87. This essay contains a lovely introductory portion that asks us to picture Chinese anthologies as gardens -- a sophisticated design principle. Then, a bravura exposition illustrates the most basic principle in choosing the peaks of Chinese poetry: peaks happen when poetry has real political potential.

I read this essay mainly to help with a professional translation gig, one that concerns poetry developments during the Northern Song dynasty. Since Pauline Yu does not concern herself with this period, I was at first not certain the piece would be useful to me.

However, it was useful. This piece has an even more important insight than any particular historical narration: it helps us begin to understand Chinese poetry historians. To Yu writing in 1998, many current historians refused to see the poetry landscape of their imagination, with its massive, highest peak in the High Tang and in the person of Du Fu, was in fact a historical development itself. I can sympathize with them: they might not wish to do understand this, because it would reveal a political agenda in poetry criticism that might seem to cheapen the art. I call that the Harold Bloom complex (glib, I know, but I can be glib when I'm talking to myself. And I'll correct myself later if this is wrong.).

A very, very brief outline of the historicization work Yu performs:

Lynn, Richard John. “The Aesthetics of Orthodoxy: Gao Bing’s 高棅 (1350-1423) Tangshi pinhui 唐詩品彚 (A Critical Anthology of Tang Poetry)” appears in Richard John Lynn, ed., Essays in Memory of James J. Y. Liu 劉若愚 (forthcoming), a manuscript of 28 pages. Prof. Lynn seems to have done much of the groundwork for Yu's statements on the roles of Yan Yu, Gao Bing and others on the formation of a Tang canon with Du Fu on top. See especially note 17, p. 77:

As noted by Richard John Lynn in his "Alternate Routes to Self-Realization in Ming Theories of Poetry," in Susan Bush and Christian Murck, eds., Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 319. Lynn also discusses Yan Yu's poetics and its implications in several other articles, among them: "Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Wang Shih-chen's Theory of Poetry and Its Antecedents," in Wm. Theodore deBary, ed., The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 217-269; "Tradition and the Individual: Ming and Ch'ing Views of Yuan Poetry," Journal of Oriental Studies, 15.1 (1977), pp. 1-19; and "The Talent-Learning Polarity in Chinese Poetics: Yan Yu and the Later Tradition," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 5 (1983), pp. 157-84.

Perhaps Yu's best achievement is her extremely stylish and well-spoken elucidation of this point. Yu, p. 80:

Gao Bing's pedagogical aspirations are also evident in the third set of boundaries he delineates, that of elaborately articulated rankings of the poems in the collection. He systematically groups all of the works included first by prosodic type, then by rank, and then, within each rank, by author. The tradition of grading individuals-especially government officials-or works had deep roots going back to the Han dynasty, and the nomenclature of Gao Bing's categories underscores both the political implications of such evaluations and his particular esteem for the High Tang....[p. 83]
Tang literary culture appeared to have institutionalized more dramatically than any other era the mutual implication of self and society, the links between the individual and the body politic that informed the discursive identity of the elite as upholders of culture and the imperial order. This had been evident above all in the inclusion of a section on poetic composition on the most literary and most prestigious civil service examination in the Tang, one that led to the degree ofjinshi art or "scholar presented" to the emperor for office.

A Canon of Canon Formation:

note 1, p. 71:

See, for example, "Poems in Their Place: Collections and Canons in Early Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 50.1 (June 1990), pp. 163-196; "Song Lyrics and the Canon: A Look at Anthologies of Tz'u," in Pauline Yu, ed., Voices of the Song Lyric in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 70-103; "The Chinese Poetic Canon and Its Boundaries," in John Hay, ed., Boundaries in China (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 105-123; and "Canon Formations in Late Imperial China," in Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 83-104

Knechtges, David R. “Culling the Weeds and Selecting Prime Blossoms: The Anthology in Early Medieval China.” In Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, eds. Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200-600. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 200-41.

note 7, p. 73

See, for example, Alan Golding, "A History of American Poetry Anthologies," in Robert von Hallberg, ed., Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 279-307, and Jane Tompkins, "'But Is It Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value," in Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.