The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry

Harvard East Asian Monographs #261

by Stephen Owen

Over the centuries, early Chinese classical poetry became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. But modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt on the accuracy of received texts. The result has destabilized the study of early Chinese poetry.

This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged, with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, Stephen Owen argues, we can see that this was "one poetry," created from a shared poetic repertoire and compositional practices. Second, it considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.

As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, and by scribes and anthologists all of whom changed texts to suit their needs.

Genres: Poetry, China, History, Nonfiction

370 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996); The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (Harvard Asia Center, 2006); and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Owen has completed the translation of the complete poetry of Du Fu, which was published as the inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities series, featuring Chinese literature in translation. Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard. In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly thought-provoking account of Chinese poetry (shī 詩, especially pentametric [wǔyán 五言] poetry) from the early medieval period, roughly 200-500 CE. Drawing mostly on the scholarship of Hans Frankel and Jean-Pierre Diény, Owen argues against a strong notion of "authorship" in poetry of this time. First, he calls into question the reliability of our sources for early poetry: most are culled from anthologies that altered the poems to make them more or less "literary." Next, he gives us a "grammar" of poetry from this time. This is by far Owen's strongest chapter. Poems were composed according to certain broad themes (travelling, feasting, sleeplessness, etc.), and followed the development of certain "topics" (putting on clothes, pacing, moonlight, breeze) in a set order. The author of such a poem was more like a "remixer," someone who took source material and shaped it to a specific purpose. In later chapters, Owen expands this argument in a number of directions, analyzing individual themes (such as "immortals" and "death and the feast") as well as the relationship of authorship to other things (such as the poetic speaker and the concept of imitation). The book concludes with seven - count 'em seven - appendices, which are essentially mini-essays on specific subjects (such as "Yuefu as a generic term") and expansions of other scholars' arguments.

This book deserves to be very closely scrutinized, subjected to one scholar or another's microscope, since Owen makes such provocative claims. His method is to gesture toward mountains of evidence, then pick up one or two choice examples, discuss them for a few pages, then move on to another example. The danger is that this could fall into cherry-picking, since Owen is rarely systematic. I'm not saying he does this here, but it's hard to know since the material he commands is daunting in both its size and its difficulty.

Stephen Owen is widely considered one of the top scholars of classical Chinese poetry in the West (and in all the world), and from this book one can see why: he makes strong, provocative arguments in well-written prose, featuring fluid translations of source material, drawing upon (but not enslaved to) previous scholarship. This carefully crafted work has set the horizons for future scholars.