Learning to Write Naturally: the Problem of Southern Song Poetry in the Late Twelfth Century

Abstract

I inquire into the nature of poetic experience by studying six leading poets in the late twelfth century. The questions they address with their prolific writing are also central to poetic (and literary) endeavors in general: what is the place of poetry among their political, intellectual, and cultural commitments; how to achieve individual freedom under a weighty textual tradition; and how to reconcile naturalness and craft, spontaneity and method. The poets reckoned with the changes in foundational concepts such as Nature, self, and vital force (qi) in the Neo-Confucian movement. They accepted the importance of studying ancient models, but rejected a difficult writing process in favor of spontaneity and speed. They were aware of the inherent contradiction between learning and spontaneity, and sported precarious solutions such as sunyata (“awakening,” borrowed from Chan Buddhism). The poets sketched scenes complete with image, feeling, and movement, in a smooth language with casual simplicity. They were also forming a theory on how to incorporate colloquial language into poetry, seeking to justify attention to the “common” (su) without impairing the “proper and elegant” (ya). The result was a peculiar blend of “new” language with the vocabulary and sentence patterns that echo past writing. I argue that they gave new meaning to the term shiren (poet), and that being a shiren in the late twelfth century meant a persistent, moment-by-moment engagement with the moving of inner sensibility through the taming of poetic language.