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Book Reviews Celebration of Continuity: Themes in Classic East Asian Poetry. Peter H. Lee. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. viii, 264 pp. $17.50. Professor Lee's purpose in this study is to set forth the pervasive topical conventions of East Asian poetry, to set them forth and to show how they have been made to function in particular instances, framed by local cultural needs and individual poetic intention. Such a purpose might suggest for its product an extensive catalog of topics with an adequate sprinkling of examples of the various usages. But that is not what the author is after. He has a more serious intention. He wants to teach us how to read East Asian poetry as it was meant to be read. His method: through a study of their topical conventions, to bring us closer to the poems as they might have been experienced by their intended audience. In this he is assuming that poems are composed more out of poetry than experience, particularly in conservative cultures. It is by understanding the accumulated and accumulating meanings drawn to themselves by common topics that we can better understand the function of a given topic in any of its particular usages. We can, that is, see a particular usage against a background of general usages and judge whether the poet, however artfully, has merely echoed (and thus reenforced) some conventional meaning in a topic or has found a new possibility in it. We can thus respond with more precision to particular poetic intentions. To quote him: Such study should not only discover and classify the conscious use of literary "constants ," but try to account for the contextual functions, the qualitative distinctions, and the individual use to which these constants are put. (p. 2) A conventional river passes through many East Asian poems, but it is always more or less compelled to take on the contours imposed by the local landscape of the individual poem. Night, as a topic, is full of possibilities gathered over centuries of poetic usage. It will not do simply to include these in a catalog of topics and their meanings. The particular meaning of a convention in any poem derives 136LEE from a knowledge shared by poet and audience. Professor Lee has attempted to create the sense of the poetic culture which made that knowledge an active principle in its literary experience. It is this that makes the book so richly valuable to modern readers, especially those with no immediate feel for the value of the conventions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean poetry. Professor Lee, to bring this immense subject into some sort of order, has divided the great and persistent themes in East Asian poetry into a pentad: praise, nature, love, friendship, and time. And he has listed the important topics that have gathered to each of these. But this much—which is considerable—does not make for the value of the study. What does that is his fine discriminations respecting conventional usage. Clifford Geertz, discussing cultural theory, asserts that "What generality it contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions , not the sweep of its abstractions." This could as well apply to Professor Lee's approach, especially the word "delicacy." Particularly for the western reader who knows none of the languages of the literatures under discussion, delicacy makes all the difference. The fineness of perception always seems based on a richly detailed sense of the materials, on examples chosen because they are representative , not because they conveniently illustrate a position. Professor Lee does not confine himself to East Asian examples in his attempt to illuminate his subject. His method is avowedly comparative. He uses western poetry as a sort of sustained analog to provide a ready means of comparison and contrast for an English-speaking audience. This procedure is, of course, enormously helpful. But such is his command over the tradition of western poetry that we receive an extra, perhaps unintended, benefit: we see poetry of our own tradition in a fresh light, as—among other things—a field of conventions that operate as they do in Asian poetry, as a vast store of possibilities which individual poets select from...

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