Reading Tang Poems as Classical Chinese Poems

Abstract

The canonization of Tangshi as an autonomous corpus and field of study, while fostering a large body of research on Tang poems, has also limited and distorted the interpretation of those poems. Tang poets were universally well-versed in the 6th-century Wen xuan anthology and other key works of Han and Six Dynasties literature, and they composed poems in the shadow of these precedents. While any reader of Tang poetry has noted the homage paid so frequently to earlier poets like Sima Xiangru or Yang Xiong, these explicit references are only the surface manifestation of a much deeper grounding in the fu and other major poetic genres prior to the Tang. Often the overall conception of a Tang poem turns out to be fundamentally a matter of integrating or responding to a complex of images already elaborated in detail in earlier poems, so that the primary meaning of the poem is lost when the source texts are ignored. In other cases even the literal meaning of a line is misinterpreted if it is removed from the context of non-shi poetry in which it originated. This paper employs as case studies some of the most famous shi poems of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin to argue for the necessity for reading Tang poems as active participants in a poetic tradition that extends beyond the shi genre and originates in the Han or earlier.