The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860), by Stephen Owen

The Late Tang brings to conclusion Stephen Owen’s overview of the major changes, vicissitudes, and codification that poetry underwent during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Along with his two proceeding titles The Poetry of the Early T’ang and The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang (1977 and 1981 respectively) the trilogy serves as a literary history to what is commonly regarded as the golden age of Chinese poetry.

The re-unification and expansion of China during the Tang dynasty, along with the revival of the civil service examination that established a massive bureaucratic system, and the development of distinct Chinese schools of Buddhism, made of seventh-century China the largest and most powerful empire in the world, whose political and cultural influence extended from Central Asia to Korea, Vietnam and beyond.

What has been described as “an unprecedented and dazzling efflorescence in the art of poetry” that took place during the Tang dynasty, began with a shift from court poetry to what Owen terms the capital poems and poets who reflected the cosmopolitan wonder that was Chang’an. In the volume on early Tang, Owen deftly traces the slow transition from the rigid codified poetry that centred around the court to the new freedom it attained in the early eighth century, “while retaining much that was good in the older style”.

When reading Owen’s most recent title, two brief appendices to the 1977 volume are worth bearing in mind: “A ‘Grammar’ of Court Poetry” and “Tonal Patterns” give a succinct account of how court poetry had become a “learnable art” based on set compositional rules (in terms of both the overall structure of a poem and formal rhyming schemes).

At its most mundane level a “parting poem” for example, which during the Tang became a social pre-requisite of anyone who aspired to be regarded as a civilised gentleman, could be composed by filling in a set form in four parts with poetic clichés:

Title indicating that one is seeing off Mr so-and-so (for example, the boss is going on a mission to the provinces);

Tri-partite poem “constructed on the model of a Chinese sentence” consisting of:

1) setting the scene/topic (for example, cause for leaving or hardship of journey ahead);
2) comment on above (for example, detail or historical parallel);
3) personal response to 1 and 2, (tear-filled eyes being perhaps the most common conclusion to a parting poem).

Parallelism, chiastic structures, and established rhyming patterns further set the parameters of court poetry. As Owen points out, “Nothing aided swift composition as much as a generous store of appropriate conventions and a fixed form in which to cast them.” Of course the better examples of the art of poetry involve a masterful and subtle use of the “rules”; much of Owen’s work involves showing how ambiguity and the subversion of a reader’s expectations led to a renewal of poetry and the creation of a style that culminated in the High Tang in the poetry of Tu Fu.

Each of Owen’s three volumes explores the various coteries of poets, and the key figures of the age, showing, through the many poems that he translates, how the literary establishment developed various traditions, themes and genres, structural and stylistic conventions, thereby placing the historical continuities and transformations in context. As is proper of literary history, the aim is to give us a glimpse into how the literary corpus came about and was transmitted. “Our goal,” says Owen, “becomes not to define the age by its major talents, but rather to use the true norms of the age to understand its greatest poets.” In any age there exists a symbiotic relationship between the major and lesser talents and also between them and the overall literary production.

Reconstructing a—and not the—history of how the Tang dynasty came to amass a corpus of poetry whose surviving poems were compiled, nearly a thousand years later, into the massive Quan Tang shi (complete Tang poetry) anthology which contains nearly 50,000 poems by over 2200 poets, involves understanding how those symbiotic inter-relationships operated.

Following Owen’s analysis of early Tang poetry as an art of social gesture and occasion and the high Tang as a self-conscious art form, which combined with a rekindling of China’s poetic past, led to a more personal mode of expression and individual voice, The Late Tang identifies the period as being characterised by a sense of belatedness in which “many poets of the period distinguished themselves by the intensity of their retrospective gaze”.

The corollary of standing in the shadow of the previous masters led to “a growing sense of poetry as a separate sphere of activity, demanding absolute commitment, with the ‘poet’ as a distinct type”. This is well illustrated by Owen’s consideration, in the present volume, of how the poetic legacy of the age was textually preserved and the growing interest that poets took in editing their own work and preparing literary collections of poems on special topics, or publishing their “Song and Response Collections” of poems sent to friends along with their friends’ answering poems.

The Late Tang opens with setting the stage by looking at how the poets fared in the Tang bureaucracy, which in theory advocated a system based on literary and ethical merit via public examinations (bearing in mind the Confucian raccourci that virtually equated moral with linguistic refinement). In practice, however, social advancement relied on the support of patrons and family ties, with poetry and poetry circles playing a major role in gaining access to the patronage system.

What the late Tang bequeathed to the next millennium was a ramification of the role and value of the poet and poetry from a singular, if shifting, trend to a multiplicity of schools with explicitly articulated principles. Although Owen does not specifically articulate the parallel, it is interesting to note that during the Tang, when China was the Buddha-land par excellence, various Buddhist schools developed and the differences in the guiding principles of those schools find numerous parallels in the various poetics of the time.

Over a third of The Late Tang is dedicated to Li Shangyin, who was better known during his lifetime as a writer of prose, but whose body of some 600 surviving poems “was to become the single most memorable cultural achievement of his era”. Following the traditional reading of Li’s oeuvre into four distinct groups of poems, Owen examines each group in separate chapters: hermetic, historical, poems on objects, and poems on occasion. As Owen points out, Li Shangyin’s poetry collection “not only contains the broadest range of styles and themes of any Late Tang poet but … contains a core of poems that are perhaps more ‘one-sided’ or ‘extreme’ than any other Late Tang poet.”

If the general thrust of poetry during the Tang dynasty shows a gradual move towards increasingly private concerns, with Li’s hermetic or ambiguous poems we find direct allusions to sexual and erotic themes, and even the privy. His fusing of past and present, abrupt transitions of scenes, and shifting viewpoints make his poetry exceedingly difficult to grasp. By reviewing some of the disparate, if not desperate, interpretations of past commentators, and giving us enough information to understand the subtlety of Li’s allusions, Owen hits the mark in showing how the poet is playing with “interpretive habits, drawing the reader to the margin of making sense and then pushing him or her over the edge”. Of the many poets from Tang China, Li Shangyin’s poetics perhaps resonate the best with modern readers, and, as A.C. Graham pointed out in his classic little anthology Poems of the Late T’ang (1965), notwithstanding the difficulties of transferring ambiguous wordplay into another language, Li Shangyin can be translated more effectively into English than China’s greatest poet Tu Fu.

Although The Late Tang can be read independently of Owen’s previous volumes, the subtlety and richness of his study of Tang poetry make it very much worthwhile to read the three volumes in sequence. Given that literary history must perforce place the individual voices in context within the literary establishment, there are omissions; in the first volume on the early Tang, Owen laments that he has to omit the collections of the Buddhist poets Han Shan and Wang Fanzhi, who wrote poems in a colloquial casual style, as being “far outside the mainstream of the poetic tradition”. But given that one of the defying stylistics of the late Tang is the appearance of love poetry with overt references to sexual desire, the omission of a chapter on women poets and the role of women in literary culture is more difficult to forgive. Song lyrics, or ci, which developed during the Tang, were inextricably associated with women as performers and poetic personae.

In both his introduction and conclusion Owen mentions the courtesan-poet Yu Xuanji (844–68) as “one of the most striking women poets of the dynasty”, for example, yet excuses her omission on the basis that the book concentrates on the first generation of Late Tang poets, from 827 to 860, who were to define the styles and themes of the period: but precisely because Yu Xuanji “is a strong personality working within a shared style” her small corpus of poetry warranted being included to show how Tang women enjoyed greater autonomy and how the social realities reflected or differed from the culture of romantic love that came to be idealised in poetry during the Late Tang.

Olivier Burckhardt, Honorary Fellow, the University of Melbourne, is a poet and essayist. Information on his current projects can be found on his website, www.obfuchai.com.