Eighth-Century Anthologies and the Creation of High Tang Poetry

Abstract

The great era of medieval Chinese poetic flourishing known as the High Tang, corresponding roughly to the first half of the eighth century and especially the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712­–756), has been the subject of much scholarly attention, which has placed its important literary movements into a coherent historical narrative and offered insightful analyses of many of its major poets, figures such as Du Fu (712–770), Li Bai (701–762), and Wang Wei (699–761). A task that remains, however, is to explore the High Tang in the context of the poetics operative during the eighth century itself, to read High Tang poetry in light of the norms and values native to its own time. To that end, the present study explores the three major extant contemporary poetry anthologies from the mid-eighth century, High Tang anthologies that collect High Tang poetry: Yin Fan’s (fl. 753) Collection of the Finest Souls of River and Alp (Heyue yingling ji), Rui Tingzhang’s (fl. 744) Collection of the Capital’s Outstanding Men (Guoxiu ji), and Yuan Jie’s (719–772) Collection from the Poem Box (Qiezhong ji). Though each bases its selections on vastly differing criteria, taken together these anthologies represent a crucial window onto the eighth-century literary scene, one that does not always offer a comfortable affirmation of modern taste vis-à-vis High Tang poetry.

Far from stolid preservers of literary relics, the High Tang anthologies were argumentative statements of values, each subject to its own competing incentives and interacting with its own conception of contemporary literary and social life. This dissertation argues that in both their poetry selections and accompanying prose materials, the three anthologies reveal that it was not deep partisan disagreements over closed philosophical categories of poetics, but rather a poet’s (or anthologist’s) social standing, his position somewhere between the center and periphery of official success and cultural cachet, that most often determined his emphasis on particular stylistic norms, and it was the pressures and incentives of identifying with certain social groups or cultural movements that gave shape to the affinities of structure, euphony, language, and imagery of High Tang verse. In the end, the work of Yin Fan, Rui Tingzhang, and Yuan Jie presents a picture of the eighth-century anthologist not merely as culler of choicest blossoms, but as active creator of the very notions of formal poetic practice that would so capture the attention of later writers and critics.