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3. Poems for the Emperor: Imperial Tastes in the Early Ninth Century
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partii.rhetoricoftaste chapter PoemsfortheEmperor:ImperialTastesintheEarly NinthCentury paulineyu ItiswellknownthatthecompilationofworksbymultipleauthorsinChina is a practice as old as the textual tradition itself. Most of the Confucian classics, for example, are essentially anthologies—of poetry, of historical, expository, and rhetorical prose, and of writings on ritual. This impulse to select and preserve literary texts was extended, time and time again, fromsuchrepositoriesofmoralwisdomandhistoricalexemplatoother enterprisesofwidelyvaryingtopic,scope,andsignificance. I have discussed elsewhere some of the likely motivations behind such endeavors, be they curatorial, normative, evaluative, pedagogical, programmatic,orhaphazard,aswellassomeoftheprinciplesbehindthe earliest extant examples in China.1 Various analogies to collecting have suggestedthemselvesalongthewayaswell.DavidAntin’scomparisonofa poeticanthologytoazooinducedmetoexploreboththesimilaritiesandthe differencesbetweenthesetwoculturalforms.2 ANewsweekreviewofMartin Scorsese’sNewYorkStoriesthatdefinedthisfilmictriptychasananthology and,therefore,“thecinematicequivalentofgrazing”thenledmetoconsider the aptness of late twentieth-century yuppie habits of consumption as a morefamiliarimagethatetymologyprovides:theGreekrootoftheword “anthology,” anthologia, as well as its Latin counterpart, florilegium, both ofwhichrefertoa“gatheringofflowers.”4 IftheGreeksimaginedthese as blossoms plucked and woven into a garland, in the Chinese tradition thebloomsweremorelikelycultivated,and,especiallyinthecaseoflarger compilations,thegatheringwasmorea“groveofletters”(wenlin文林)or “literarygarden”(wenyuan文苑).And,indeed,principlesofselectionand arrangementcouldbeasindividualandvariableashorticulturalprojects wouldcometobe. There is no comparison in either the Greek or the Latin tradition, however, to the sheer number of anthologies produced in China, which proliferatedmarkedlyfromthethirdcenturyonward.Thebibliographical essayinthehistoryoftheSuidynasty,forexample,enumeratesthetitles ofanthologies,ofwhichwereextantbythetimeofitscompilation in .5 The Tang dynasty (–) continued this tradition, and the earlyyearsinparticularwitnessedtheproductionoflargecompendiaand encyclopedias that among other functions, provided important models for use in official composition.6 Given the extraordinary burgeoning of poeticproductionduringtheTang,itshouldcomeasnosurprisetofind a significant number of collections throughout the dynasty focusing on poetry alone. Approximately sixty titles of such anthologies, many from thesamehand,arelistedinthetwoTanghistories,ofwhichninewerestill in circulation when the Qing scholar Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (–) publishedhisTenAnthologiesofTangPoems(ShizhongTangshixuan十種 唐詩選 ).7 The titles of the original group suggest that a number of different principlesgovernedtheselectionandorganizationofthesecontemporary collections. While some editors collected works from the entire dynasty, othersfocusedonamorenarrowchronologicalscope.Theirvolumeshave thusbeenidentified,thankstolaterperiodizationschemes,asanthologies primarilyofEarly(–),8 High(–),9 Middle(–),10 orLate (–)11 Tangpoetry.Someanthologistsincludedpoetryfromasingle geographicalareaoraparticularsocialgroup,suchascourtofficials,Taoists, andwomen.Somerestrictedthemselvestoonlyonepoeticsub-genre,be [3.129.195.206] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11:08 GMT) prosodicform,suchasregulatedverseorquatrains. Principles of organization and annotation were similarly various. Most,butnotall,volumesgrouppoemsbyauthor;however,thoseinturn appear sometimes according to official status,13 or more commonly, in chronological order—although often approximate—by age. Drawing on themodelofZhongRong’s鍾嶸(–)GradingsofPoetry(Shipin詩 品),twoofthebest-knownanthologists,YinFan殷璠andGaoZhongwu 高仲武,providecriticallyappreciativeorevaluativecommentstopoems. BiographicalinformationappearsforthefirsttimeinYaoHe’s姚合ninthcentury collection as well. As Wu Qiming 吳企明 has pointed out, the continuallyincreasingnumbersofpoemsandpoetsthroughoutthedynasty providedboththeopportunityandtheneedtoachievesomecontrolover andcreateaframeworkwithinwhichtograsp,andtopreserve,analltoo fleetingmultiplicityofforms.14 WualsonotesthattheWenxuan文選 (Selectionsofrefinedliterature), compiledduringthereignofCrownPrinceXiaoTong蕭統(–)of...
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