Studies in Chinese Poetry.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

Studies in Chinese Poetry. By JAMES R. HIGHTOWER and FLORENCE CHIA-YING YEH. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 47. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 1998. Pp. xvi + 607.

Of the seventeen essays collected here, eleven (not ten, as the book-jacket has it) have been previously published, the majority in the pages of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. The remaining six (not seven) here appear for the first time. Although four of the seventeen bear Hightower's name as author and the others Yeh's, all of them are the result of a close and continuing collaboration by these two eminent scholars that began some thirty years ago. The interesting history of this collaboration is sketched in Yeh's "Foreword" (pp. ix-xiii).

The essays are here divided into three groups, comprising four items on shih poetry, ten on tz'u poetry, and four on Wang Kuowei. The published articles, dating from 1968 to 1994, have been reset and reprinted (not reproduced) with no later revisions or additions. But where an original publication did not include the Chinese texts of poems translated these have been provided.

These are, without exception, very learned essays each of which has made its mark on the field. Those in the second group, especially, dealing with various writers and topics of the tz'u, are, quite simply, the best studies ever done in English on...