Defining experience: the "poems of seductive allure" (yanshi) of the mid-Tang poet Yuan Zhen (779-831).

• Author: Shields, Anna M.
• Position: Critical Essay

IN A LETTER TO HIS FRIEND Bo Juyi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in 815, the poet Yuan Zhen [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] described a collection of "over eight hundred" of his own poems that he had presented to an official visiting his area a few years earlier, in 812. In his letter, Yuan tells Bo that he is giving him a copy of these works, with another two hundred new pieces, for Bo to read and comment on. Since no copy of this early collection apparently circulated, we do not know the exact contents of the thousand-plus poem collection Yuan gave his friend. But in his letter, Yuan takes great pains to explain the ten-category system by which he subdivided his poetry, giving both form and content definitions for each of the categories. Yuan creates a category he calls yanshi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which I translate "poetry of seductive allure," and divides the category into gu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or "ancient[-style]," verse and jin [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or "recent[-style]," verse. In these two categories of yanshi, Yuan states that he includes more than one hundred poems--in other words, a significant component of a thousand-poem collection.

Yuan Zhen's "poetry of seductive allure"--or what we think remains of it--had a curious transmission history after the Tang, a history that has surely affected readers' understanding of Yuan Zhen's oeuvre and the shape of romantic literature in the mid-Tang generally. The modern scholarship on Yuan's yanshi has split roughly into two groups: scholars have either examined the poems separately from Yuan Zhen's other work, or they have used the poems to support arguments made about the important romantic story attributed to Yuan Zhen, "The Tale of Yingying." (1) In what follows, I propose a different way of reading Yuan Zhen's yanshi, which is to reintegrate them into three essential contexts: Yuan Zhen's broader views on the nature and function of poetry; Yuan Zhen's biography and his literary representations of his experiences; and certain mid-Tang literary trends, specifically, the literary exploration of the private life, the reinvention of generic categories, and the interest in the strange. By reading Yuan 's yanshi in these contexts, I think we can better understand a pervasive feature of mid-Tang culture--the interest in romance and its representations--that is too often overlooked in studies of single genres, specific movements, and individual authors. Yuan Zhen's desire to record and preserve his poems about "women of recent years" reveals not only his youthful fondness for the talented beauties of the Tang capitals, by which many ambitious mid-Tang men were fascinated, but also the private depths (if not profundities) that could be explored by pushing the boundaries of poetic topical decorum. In texts ranging from prefaces to stories, Yuan Zhen reveals that he has strong literary and personal reasons for preserving his romantic texts.

What makes Yuan Zhen's yanshi unusual in the mid-Tang context is not so much Yuan's version of the Tang romantic vignette (although there are odd features in his vignettes that I will explore) as his deliberate attempt to incorporate such romantic texts into his larger literary oeuvre. Yuan Zhen was one of many mid-Tang writers who were deeply engaged in rethinking the boundaries and capacities of wen, and in his letters and essays on literature, we see Yuan calling upon literary history and canonical standards to create a framework for his own and others' literary experiments. Although he may have distanced himself from the yanshi in his later years, Yuan's defense of them in 815 reveals his catholic construction of wen, a construction that included romantic confessions. (2) By examining Yuan's defense of his poetry as a whole, we see that his arguments about the yanski fit into other arguments being made by himself and others about wen in the mid-Tang, such as the argument that wen should be responsive to p ersonal interests, that it should speak to contemporary problems, and that it could engage even the "strange" (guai [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) phenomena of the world. (3) What distinguishes Yuan Zhen's yanshi from other experimental poetry of the era (one might think of Han Yu's experiments with archaic language, for example), is its decidedly uncanonical, though deeply conventional, subject matter. In the end, I think we have to see Yuan Zhen's attempt to defend his romantic poetry along canonical lines as a failure, but a very interesting failure: in trying to construct categories of poetry along traditional lines that could contain this personal, erotic verse, Yuan Zhen shows himself to be a vital part of the reformulations of wen taking place in the early ninth century. At the same time, his awkward defense of romantic poetry reveals a basic inadequacy in inherited definitions of poetry: the absence of arguments for poetry as a means to explore the private and the heterodox.

RECONSTRUCTING A FRAGMENTED CORPUS: THE MARGINALIZATION OF YUAN ZHEN'S YANSHI

Although Yuan Zhen defended his "poetry of seductive allure" as an integral part of his oeuvre in 815, it is difficult to assess the place of Yuan Zhen's yanshi within his final corpus and in the context of mid-Tang literature due to the curious transmission history of what most scholars believe to be all that remains of the "over one hundred" yanshi described in the letter. The story of these fifty-seven poems reveals much about later readers' tastes and agendas in reading Tang poetry. From the early Northern Song through the late Ming and early Qing period, Yuan's yanshi were marginalized from his collected works, although their existence was known and noted by Song bibliographers. But Yuan's collection suffered far more damage than this: forty juan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Yuan's 100-juan collected works, the Yuanshi Changqing ji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Collection of Mr. Yuan from the Changqing [Reign Period]), was lost at some point between the Five Dynasti es and Northern Song eras. Scholarship on the literary and political thought of Yuan Zhen has long lagged behind that on his friend and contemporary, Bo Juyi (772-846), who is regarded as a more important contributor to mid-Tang intellectual life. However, Bo Juyi was famous for having ensured the preservation of his own works by storing no fewer than five copies in different locations across China, (4) whereas Yuan Zhen's collection met the fate of so many other Tang works--partial transmission through the Song and thereafter. We have no way to determine what kinds or numbers of texts were lost from among the forty Juan, but we can be sure that our understanding of Yuan Zhen would be much more complete, and likely more complex, with those texts. (5) In assessing Yuan's opinion of the yanshi and their place in his collection, we must also acknowledge that we have no late documents that discuss these youthful poems, poems that Yuan may indeed have disavowed late in life. But the transmission history of the yan shi speaks to a different problem entirely: the degree to which later readers were reluctant to incorporate these "poems of seductive allure" into their reading of Yuan Zhen as a Tang poet.

The transmission of the "poems of seductive allure" begins with the collection Yuan made in 812 and Yuan's 815 letter to Bo Juyi, in which he mentions the category of yanshi. No further record of this collection--which was made privately, for a friend and potential political patron--exists outside of the letter. After 812 and before his death in 831, Yuan made three other collections of his work that we know of: first, two small selections, in 819 and 821 (of five and ten Juan, respectively), that were submitted for political aims. (6) Then, in 823, in a period when Yuan was no longer in the white-hot political center, though well-placed in the provinces, he compiled his collected works in one hundred juan, and entitled it Yuanshi Changqing ji. (7) No preface exists for the Yuanshi Changqing ji, though surely there must have been one, probably written by Bo Juyi. Yuan Zhen followed up his collection by compiling and editing Bo Juyi's collected works a year later, titling it Boshi Changqing ji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the collection of Mr. Bo from the Changqing [Reign Period], in fifty Juan, and writing a preface for it, which survives.

The complicated transmission history of Yuan Zhen's work begins after the fall of the Tang. Around the year 950, one Wei Hu, an official at the court of the Ten Kingdoms state of Latter Shu compiled a 100-juan anthology of Tang poetry that contained over a thousand poems, in which he included fifty-seven poems by Yuan Zhen. Wei Hu's anthology was entitled Caidiao ji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or Collection of the Tunes of the Talents. The Caidiao Ji as a whole emphasizes romantic poetry and prefers mid- and late Tang poets over High Tang poets (there are famously no poems by Du Fu in this collection). (8) Yuan Zhen's fifty-seven poems are similar in theme to Wei Hu's other selections of light verse: among them are the "Hui zhen shi"[CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "Meeting with the Perfected One," from Yuan's "Tale of Yingying," and a poem that tells some of that same story, "Meng you chun" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "Dream of Wandering in Spring," which was examined by James Hightower in his 1973 article on Yuan Zhen and the "Tale of Yingying." (9) The titles of others give an accurate impression of their content: "Spring Longings," "Dreaming of Old Times," "Late Evening in the Boudoir," "Parting in Spring," "Peach Blossoms," "A Dancer's Waist," "Flower-gazing," "Spring Dawn," as well as a few poems directly addressed to...