The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'Ang

by Stephen Owen

Hailed as the most important and most comprehensive single study of Tang poetry to have appeared in English when originally published by Yale University Press in 1981, this Quirin Press Revised Edition brings back into print this much sought after title and offers the full original text with the following Older Wade-Giles transliteration fully updated and revised to the current Pinyin standard; Fully re-typeset and proofed for typographical errors and inconsistencies. New expanded index including Chinese characters. Following Owen's analysis in "The Poetry of Early Tang" (also available from Quirin Press) of poetry as an art of social gesture and occasion this title explores the poetry of the High Tang which has often been referred to as "apogee of all Chinese poetry." Rather than merely defining the poetic art of eighth century China through Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, Owen delves into the norms of the age to become acquainted with the symbiotic relationship that existed both between the major and lesser talents of the age, and the overall literary tradition. In these pages the poetry of the High Tang comes to life as a self-conscious art form, which, combined with a rekindling of China's poetic past, lead to a more personal mode of expression and individual voice that culminated in the unprecedented and dazzling efflorescence of the art. Extracts available on www.quirinpress.com Chinese Poetry - Tang Dynasty 618-907 - Poetics - History & Criticism. Owen's companion volume on the Early Tang is also available from Quirin Press 978-1-922169-02-0 (paperback). For further information and extracts visit www.quirinpress.com

Genres: Poetry, China, History, Nonfiction

456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Stephen Owen (1946–2026) was an American sinologist who specialized in Chinese literature, particularly Tang-dynasty poetry and comparative poetics.

Much of his work was 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.

Reviews

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyability: ★★★★★

If you like poetry, this book is a delight to read, as it includes lots of annotated translations of Classical Chinese verse. If you like very traditional literary history and criticism, this is close to an optimal example of both: it is very well-written, the arguments it presents are easy to follow, well illustrated and well argued.

Enlightenment: ★★★★★

I am a nerd about premodern Classical Chinese literature, among other things. I obviously knew quite a bit about these topics before reading this volume (some of it taken from other books that Owen himself wrote), but it still offered a treasure trove of new details, information and clarifications, and a much better mental map of the literature of what is perhaps the best-known and most studied of Chinese literary epochs.

Originality: ★★★★★

The late Stephen Owen, who died earlier this year, was arguably the most important Sinologist of his generation, and certainly the most prestigious academic specialist on Tang-dynasty literature, and it shows. This book, which was published in… the very early eighties? offered a fresh perspective at the time on a much-studied topic.

Cultural weight: ★★★★★

Related to the previous point, Owen’s arguments and books have become, I think, genuinely canonical at least in Anglophone Sinological studies. His picture is the baseline for all current scholarship on Tang poetry, whether to agree with it or to respond to it.

*They don’t write books like this anymore (mostly)*

I know this is going to sound like an old man’s rant, so you can skip to the next point if you want to avoid it. Let me start by saying that this is a kind of work that generally does not get produced anymore. I don’t think it is useful to dwell on golden ages of literary criticism and literary history, but when you take Owen’s trilogy on Tang-dynasty poetry (this volume, an earlier one dedicated to the Early Tang, and a later one dedicated to the Late Tang) you will be hard-pressed to find anything similar being produced today.

People like Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, James J. Y. Liu, Eric Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, William Empson, or Northrop Frye have become a dying breed, mostly replaced by a Waste Land populated by petty people under the spell of the School of Resentment, surrogate politics, and masturbatory forays into abstruse and narcissistic poststructuralist and postmodern thought. In the wise words of Tony Soprano: “No leeway, no compromise, just stupid fuckin’ jokes”.

So take this book, and the others in the series, as rediscovered treasures from a bygone age. Read them, enjoy them, learn from them and feel somewhat depressed at current mediocrity: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”.

*A brief prequel*

The High Tang is a study of Classical Chinese poetry (basically shi and yuefu), it main writers, its characteristics and changes during the 8th century CE. This period mostly, but not exclusively, overlaps with the reign of Tang Xuanzong (712 to 756), which witnessed the greatest social, cultural, economic and artistic flourishing of what was already the greatest dynasty in imperial History. So for lay readers, let’s make a little detour about this.

The start of China’s unified, imperial period is usually placed with Qin Shi Huangdi’s conquest of the Warring States and his self-proclamation as ‘Divine Thearch’ (a loose translation of 皇帝, more commonly ‘Emperor’) in 221 BCE. His dynasty was short-lived, but the Han, which followed it, lasted for about 400 years and consolidated the ideal and practice of a unified Empire, its institutions, culture and day-to-day practical machinery, becoming a blueprint to be replicated for the next 2000 years. But in 220 CE, after many years of strife and civil war, China fell into about four centuries of fragmentation, which (like the European case after the fall of Rome), potentially could have lasted to this day. But it didn’t: in the late sixth century, China was reunified by Sui Wendi, and in a replication of the Qin-Han scenario, Wendi’s brief dynasty was soon replaced by the Tang, which reaped the benefits of unification, and would last for about 300 years (620 to 904).

The Tang has been called the Cosmopolitan Empire, and forever remained a high point of Imperial China. It was a culturally and materially brilliant age, with Chinese power expanding into Central Asia, with its capital, Chang’an, as one of the greatest and most populous cities in the world and with a synthetic and flourishing literary culture which unified northern and southern traditions and created the standard, ‘regulated’ forms of shi verse.

Jumping now to poetry and the first century of Tang rule (620 to 712), Owen’s earlier book The Early Tang gives a literary history of this period which is centered around the idea of Court Poetry. During the centuries of disunion, southern China had developed poetry into a very idiosyncratic art, and often at loggerheads with the old, Han-inherited platitudes about the functions of literature, which had retained a stronger hold in the north. Court poetry was essentially an aristocratic and highly social pastime: topical, decorous, socially coded, and mostly detached from urgent political or personal seriousness. Its dominant modes were stylized love lyrics derived from folk songs and polished occasional poems on objects, banquets, buildings, seasons, or other moments in court life. Aesthetically, it was meant to be a highly unoriginal and ultra-polished craft in which poets worked on subtle variations of themes and forms and ticked off a set list of boxes of rhetoric, decorum, lexical propriety, and formal structure. The Tang unification would assimilate and continue this tradition, as best exemplified in the works of Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen, but Owen’s book also chronicles the process through which poets working from within this tradition began to resist and gradually transform the conventions of court poetry that would form the background to later Tang greatness.

*So what’s this book about?*

Back to the eighth century: the reign of Xuanzong witnesses a transition from court to capital poetry, mainly characterized by the expansion of the people who engage in this craft from a small group of nobles and courtiers to a much wider scholar-official class. Most of these writers come to the capital to compete in the civil-service examinations, which open doors to social mobility (and in which competence at writing poetry is highly valued) and form coteries and associations around important High Tang politicians like Zhang Yue and Zhang Jiuling, who act as patrons for many of the early High Tang poets. Capital poetry is essential as the shared starting ground for all of these writers: the best of them will adapt to, resist, and/or transform this tradition, while still working from within it.

Another major thread is the shift from poetry as social gesture toward poetry as self-conscious art. Tang poetry never becomes “pure art” in the modern Western sense, as it remains tied to occasion, social role, moral stance, and civilization, but by the end of this period, poets are increasingly shifting toward views of poetry that emphasize the importance of posterity, of a personal, individual (and sometimes eccentric) voice, and that regard poetic identity as orthogonal to immediate social occasions.

Two other aspects that Owen highlights are the “rediscovery” and reactivation of older voices in the poetic tradition, which had been somewhat marginalized during the apogee of Southern-dynasties-style capital poetry, and the play of the generations. Those poets, for example, who start writing in the 720s do not inhabit the same poetic world as those who mature in the 740s and 750s; there is a clear transition in style and taste between poets of the Kaiyuan and Tianbao eras, respectively. The first generation still puts the focus on poetry as craft, while exploring some newly developed artistic freedoms; the later poets develop in a more original and flamboyant direction and, having become great geniuses and masters, generate anxieties of influence of a sort, as well as a tendency among their own successors to follow and imitate polished models slavishly. What apparently puts an end to the High Tang is the final breaking and splitting of this relatively unified tradition, which had been held together by being an aggregation of different responses to the commonly shared backdrop of the capital-poetry tradition.

Finally, one last thing to mention about the overall book is how, while it in many ways reinforces the stereotype of the High Tang as the “greatest age of Chinese poetry” (a belief very soon canonized and fixed by the Chinese themselves from the Song dynasty onward) much of Owen’s work consists in challenging many of the platitudes and conventions we have about the age and its writers. A very interesting fact, for example, is how little value Du Fu and Li Bai, who would end up as the greatest and most appreciated Chinese poets of all time, were given by their own contemporaries. Some other less glaring examples (such as his resistance to the characterization of Gao Shi and Cen Shen as “frontier poets”) are covered in each of the chapters of The High Tang.

*Chapter Summaries*

(goodreads limits the size of the reviews, so if you want to check a summary of each of the sixteen chapters, you'll have to go to my substack for it: https://booksandnotes.substack.com/p/...).

*Conclusion*

Owen’s High Tang is a monumental work. It may have its defects, but those are just minor flaws of an extraordinary work about an extraordinary age. Like the gentleman from Ode 55 of the Shijing, it is “As thing cut, as thing filed / As thing chiseled, as thing polished”. It is a labor of love and of scholarship, and modulo you being minimally interested in Chinese poetry and literary history, you will find it enjoyable, instructive and indispensable. And that is about as high as praise gets. Go and read this book. Now.

[Quynh Anh]

Lilly Library (Earlham college)