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  • The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song: Emotional Energy and Literati Self-Cultivation
  • Joseph R. Allen (bio)
Colin S. C. Hawes . The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song: Emotional Energy and Literati Self-Cultivation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. x, 213 pp. Hardcover $55.000, ISBN 0-7914-6471-7.

This volume offers us a clear and precise account of the social function of classical poetry in China during the eleventh century, primarily as manifested in the works of Mei Yaochen (1002-1060) and Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072). We might question whether these two poets alone can represent a time and culture as complex as the Northern Song, but that should not disallow the effectiveness of Hawes' approach. Despite his relatively narrow focus, the implications of this study extend far and significantly beyond these two poets and their times. The arguments here are relevant to much of medieval and early modern Chinese poetry; in fact, I am perhaps more optimistic about this than is Hawes.

Do not be misled by Hawes' theoretical-sounding title (circulation, energy, self-cultivation, and all that); this work is more closely related to social history than to literary theory, which, indeed, may hearten some readers. Hawes wants to situate the composition of this poetry in its social, even psychological contexts; at the same time he wants to pull it away from the moral-political interpretations that are commonly associated with it. Early on he states his purpose:

I argue that the main justification for writing poems in this period was not so much to spread Confucian moral principles in their content, as to develop and sustain human relationships through the regular exchange of poems with friends and acquaintances. Thus, as long as their poem exchanges fostered harmonious social action-in itself a central Confucian virtue-Northern Song poets saw no reason to preach narrowly about social or political issues in their poems.

(p. 3)

While Hawes does not use the term here or elsewhere, his intent is to investigate the performativity of this poetry, rather than its hermeneutics. Hawes proceeds to investigate five functions (his term) of this performance and exchange (p. 4).

The first chapter addresses the purported political and social critical function of this poetry: the so-called "dao/way" transported by/in "wen/writing." He argues that while some poems were either intended or construed to have such critical content, these are relatively few and cannot be considered representative of the poetry in general. Rather he highlights the often "trivial and lighthearted subject matter" that this writing bore, not its high moral or social argument. To his defense, Hawes cites Zhu Dongrun's preface to his 1980 edition of Mei Yaochen's collected poems, which blames the vast majority of Mei's 2,900 poems for lacking seriousness (p. 12). It is that very lack of seriousness that is the focus of Hawes' [End Page 126] investigations. A specific form of such "trivialness" is explored in the second chapter, "Poetry as Game." Again, with such a title we perhaps may expect something more theoretical, along the lines of Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1950), but this is not so. Here we have a review of different styles of poetic play, such as rhyme matching, topic setting, et cetera-common fare in any poetic salon, as John Marney (Chinese Anagrams and Anagram Verse [1993]) has shown. Hawes laments that (unnamed) scholars have censured these playful pieces for their "lapses of taste" (p. 31), but claims, and rightly so, that this type of verse is significant in the social exchange that the poetry maintains. We might want to push this defense even further and argue, à la Huizinga, that poetry is based on the principle of play (which is what distinguishes poetry from prose); these forms just make that play more explicit.

Hawes brings poetic/social exchange most clearly into the mainstream in chapter 3, which explores friendship and the poem as a socialdocument-a letter of introduction, evidence of talent, or a greeting card. His view of these documents is relatively straightforward, without the cynicism that we might expect in an investigation of the...

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