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Sung Dynasty Poetic Criticism So at a chance encounter You hear rare music112 5 Ssu-k'ung T'u feels that a poet can find the Way, can find ultimate Truth, by starting with evocative images of nature and then allowing his mind to move freely on to enter the Void. Stirred by the images in the poem the reader then is also drawn on beyond the words themselves to meanings far too subtle to be bound by words. This idea was unforgettably expressed some centuries before by the poet T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) in his fifth ‘Yin chiu' (On drinking wine) poem: 'There is a meaning in all this but I have forgotten the words.'13 Poetry, then, is a means for becoming one with Nature, the ideal of the Taoists. In order for poetry to perform this function its diction must be simple,its images vivid, and suggestive. Ssu-k'ung T'u put into poetic language ideas which stem from Taoist philosophy and his influence on later poets all the way down to Wang Kuo-wei was considerable. Sung Dynasty Poetic Criticism With the Sung dynasty there came the great surge in poetic criticism that has continued to the present day. Scholars continued to write down many of their ideas and comments in poems, in letters to friends, in prefaces and colophons, in philosophical essays, and in little books of family advice, but gradually another form of writing took shape which was to become the accepted vehic1e for poetic criticism, that is to say, shih-hua and tz'u-hua. A shih-hua or tz'u-hua is a collection of comments by one person relating to various aspects of poetry. A comment may be as short as one or two lines or as long as a page or more, but each is a unit in itself. There may be a relationship to the one which follows or precedes it in that several comments about one poet wi11 be grouped together, but no sustained argument or development of ideas carries from one to the next. There is also in some works a rough chronological arrangement with comments about early history and poets preceding those on the contemporary scene. It is difficult to make a generalization about the length of shih-hua or tz'u-hua. Some are little more than a few pages long. Others, like Yüan Mei's (1716-97) S:衍-yüan shih-hua, may run to eight hundred and more pages. 12 Shih p'的， pp. 4b-5a; tr. by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang,‘The twentyfour modes of poet叮戶 ， Chinese Literature, 1963, no. 7, p. 74. 13 Ching-chieh hsien-sheng chi, 3f16b. 6 Chinese Literary Criticism The diversity of content and apparent purpose of this form of criticism plagued the early cataloguers. Were they works of fiction or should they be considered supplementary material for the elucidation of history? Was their emphasis placed more on biographical sketches of poets or on technicalities and evaluations of verse-making? That a11 these elements could and commonly did enter into the composition of a shih-hua or tz'u-hua made classification di血cult. However, works which in the Sung咽shih (History of the Sung dynasty) had been scattered over several categories were, in the late eighteenth-century annotated catalogue Ssu-k'u ch 站ian-shu tsung-mz人 grouped together under a single heading, Shih-wen p~的og-lei (Criticism of poetry and prose) toward the end of the major section entitled Chi pu (Collected works). One definition of shih-hua which points up the diversity of content is that of Hsü Yi (戶. c. 1111), who stated in the opening lines of his Yen-chou shih-hua: (Shih-huαdistinguish ways of expression, fi11 in gaps in information about many points ancient and modern, record examples of superlative virtue, make note of extraordinary things, and correct misrepresentations and errors.' Hsü Yi seemed to view the purpose and scope ofsuch works with a great deal more seriousness than did Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-72), who wrote some fifty years before him what is generally considered the first real shih-hua (or at least the first work which used the term in its title), Liu-yi shih-hua. He eXplained at the beginning of the work: ‘When 1 retired to Ju-yin14 1 made this co11ection as an aid to light conversation.' Ssu-ma Kuang continued the pattern set by Ou-yang Hsiu with...

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