This paper begins by pointing out that the famous Tang dynasty poet, Wang Wei, was also a painter and musician. Then, by close examination of half a dozen of Wang Weis poems (including “Deer Walled,” “Farewell in the Mountains,” and “Sitting alone on an Autumn Night”), the author tries to explain exactly how Wang Wei’s “painter's eye” influenced his poetic narration. The author concludes that Wang Wei often employs a shifting viewpoint (from first person to third, and back, etc.) in his poems which helps him to capture “a most significant moment,” and sometimes maintain a “purely detached” narrative point of view.

Many of Wang Wei’s and Basho’s poems are often misunderstood as pure descriptions of nature, but in essence their poems demonstrate the idea of Zen and reflect the Buddhist state of mind. While both Wang Weis and Basho’s poetry reflect the intuitive wisdom of Zen, their poems emphasize different aspects of Zen, which show a key difference between Chinese and Japanese literature. Wang Wei’s poetry aims at beauty and the fusion of the scene and the state of mind, while the expressive form of Basho’s haiku is an embodiment of Zen. Thus as artistic works, the two poet’s poems are of a different nature and employ different techniques.

This paper studies Ruan Ji’s Prosepoem on Pure Thought as a major document of Neo-Daoist aesthetics of the Wei-Jin Period. It tries to unfold the symbolic structure of the prosepoem by comparing it with major Western poetic works that employ similar strategies of conveying critical insight through the significant use of structural devices. The chosen examples include Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat,” and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night. By a close reading of Ruan Ji’s work, the paper points out that the prosepoem contains a self-conscious, detailed and relatively complete account of a poets inspirational experience, showing penetrating insight into creative psychology. Unlike earlier Daoist masters who often seem to have réjected the experience of rapture as a typical way of attaining truth, Ruan Ji perceives it as an authentic experience of spiritual enlightenment and aesthetic fulfillment. His concept of “true beauty” as lying beyond the senses and conscious judgment, intangible and inexplicable, has not only characterized his won works but also shaped the aesthetic taste of his time, as exemplified in the intuitive spontaneity and charming allusiveness characteristic of the “Wei-Jin style.”

This essay playfully compares the critical theories (poetics) of the 5th-6th century Chinese Zhong Hong and the Renaissance Italian Scaliger. The two thinkers have some interesting parallels in their critical approaches or methodologies, as well as some key differences. Thus while Zhong Hong thought that any kind of formalized poetic writing interfered with the direct expression of feelings and the beauty of natural sound, Scaliger, in the rhetorical tradition of Aristotle and Horace, finally considered the poets moral purpose, his power of persuasion, to be paramount. And while Scaliger tried to create a systematic and objective classification of poets through his tripartite division into psychological (poetic inspiration), temporal (age) and topical (subject) categories, Zhong Hong attempted to standardize and objectify critical value judgements through his schematized order of grades of poetry grounded in an “aesthetic judgement” concerned only with the “Quality” of a poem.

This essay compares two traditions of highly stylized love lyric: the German late medieval Des Minnesangs Fruehling, which is in the tradition of the troubadours and related to Renaissance Petrarchism, and Chinese Palace Style Poetry of the Liang Dynasty. In both cases “woman” is taken as the object of the poem and depersonalized into an abstract entity, thus being deprived of her concrete individuality. To this end the technique of “blazoning” is employed, whereby the various parts of the woman’s body are described in erotic or lurid detail: this is really a rhetorical taking control of the woman’s body by the male speaker (poet). But while the German Minnesang sublimates the feminine qualities into a life-enhancing ideal spiritual essence to be praised (revered) by the male speaker/poet, the Chinese Palace Style Poetry reduces the “woman” to a merely art-enhancing artificial object, a purely aesthetic and erotic object of desire for the decadent pleasure of the male aristocrats at court.

BBook Review: Marion Eggert, Rede vom Traum. Traumauffassungen der Literatenschicht im spaten kaiserlichen China, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993.