Poetry as Epistemology: The Naïve Poet Yang Wanli (1127-1206) in the Age of Learning

Abstract

This dissertation starts with and has been constantly driven by one question: do we have to know the world in order to write good poetry about it? This question is asked in the poetic and intellectual context of twelfth century China, a society known for its obsession with learning (xue 學), as well as its search and representation of the inner coherence (li 理) of the world in various forms of human practices. It is investigated through the case study of Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127-1206), the last major Song (960-1279) poet who struggled to redefine the nature and function of classical Chinese poetry in a new episteme following the collapse of cultural synthesis. Yang chose to become a naïve poet and to represent the world as it might appear to a child’s eye, while sustaining his reflective faith in the coherence and meaningfulness of the world’s inherent patterns. Yang Wanli was both a product of his time and a peculiar counter example of it, and thus he provides us with a perfect embodiment of the complexities of the culture of learning and its discontents. Viewed through this paradoxical prism, this thesis examines how Yang as a philosopher-poet develops a poetics of negation out of the poetic culture he inherits, one that worships the literary tradition; how he, by raising suspicions about the transmissibility of cognitive experience and the adequacy of language as a carrier of that experience, challenges the epistemological cornerstones laid down by Neo-Confucianism’s chief architect of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) as well as the latter’s scheme of restoring the order of the world. And lastly, how he as a sophisticated literary critic and thinker himself, eventually creates a seemingly naïve poetry with a “gusto of ideas” (liqu, 理趣) that illuminates the ubiquitous yet invisible pattern of the universe without reducing its infinite particularities.