Harvard East Asian Monographs

2 primary works

The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry

by Stephen Owen

Published 1 December 2006

Over the centuries, early Chinese classical poetry became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. But modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt on the accuracy of received texts. The result has destabilised the study of early Chinese poetry. This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the 1st Century B.C and the 3rd Century A.D. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged, with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, Stephen Owen argues, we can see that this was 'one poetry,' created from a shared poetic repertoire and compositional practices. Second, it considers how the scholars of the late 5th and early 6th Centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.
As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction - reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, and by scribes and anthologists - all of whom changed texts to suit their needs.

The Late Tang

by Stephen Owen

Published 1 January 2007

The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura.

In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary history of the Tang that he began in his works on the Early and High Tang. Focusing in particular on Du Mu, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun, he analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. The Late Tang, Owen argues, forces us to change our very notion of the history of poetry. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of available choices-styles, genres, the voices of past poets. It was this repertoire that would endure.