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詩品

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Text ID
KR4i0003
Date
513–517
Dynasty
梁

Shīpǐn 詩品

Gradings of Poets by 鍾嶸 (撰)

About the work

The Shīpǐn 詩品, in three juǎn, is — with Liú Xié’s 劉勰 Wénxīn diāolóng KR4i0001 — one of the two foundational works of Chinese literary criticism, and the earliest comprehensive critical assessment of a poetic corpus. Composed by Zhōng Róng 鍾嶸 (ca. 468–518), zì Zhòngwěi 仲偉, of Yǐngchuān 潁川, during his Liáng official career (probably 513–517, certainly before his death in 518), it grades 122 (or 123, by some counts) writers of five-character verse from the Hàn down to the Liáng into three classes — upper, middle, and lower — with a discursive preface at the head of each class. The grading methodology is twofold: poets are ranked by perceived value, and at the same time each poet is genealogically affiliated with an earlier model (e.g., “X derives from the Guófēng via Y”), so that the book functions also as the first attempt at a theory of poetic descent. The Shīpǐn introduced — or helped to introduce — much of the vocabulary that has dominated Chinese poetics ever since: cí cǎi 詞采, xìng 興, bǐ 比, fù 賦, zī wèi 滋味, zhí xún 直尋. Wilkinson §30.5 calls it “the first comprehensive study of poetry from the Han to the Liang dynasty, whose approach of judging a poet by his character, his writings, and the impression of his poems on the reader had considerable later influence.”

Tiyao

Shīpǐn, by Zhōng Róng of the Liáng. Róng’s zì was Zhòngwěi 仲偉, of Yǐngchuān Chángshè. He and his elder brother Yán 岏 and younger brother Yǔ 嶼 were all studious and famous. During the Southern Qí Yǒngmíng era he was a student in the Imperial Academy; Wáng Jiǎn 王儉 selected him as xiùcái of his native province; he entered office as Wángguó shìláng. Entering the Liáng he rose to Jìshì of the Prince of Jìnān 晉安王, dying in office. Róng’s learning ran broadly through the Yì, and he was at the same time accomplished in literary diction.

He grades the five-character poems of antiquity and recent times — 103 poets from the HànWèi onward — discussing their merits and faults, dividing them into upper, middle, and lower grades. Each grade is prefaced by a wonderful prose introduction that opens out the literary principle and may be set beside the Wénxīn diāolóng. Recently Wáng Shìzhēn 王士禎 argued at length that the grading is mistaken in many places. But it is now over a millennium since the Liáng; nine in ten of the old poems are lost, and one cannot judge from surviving scraps what the original full corpora were like. Only the genealogical assertions (“X’s poetry derives from Y”, as if Zhōng had personally seen the master-disciple succession) ring as forced attributions.

History (Liáng shū) records that Zhōng once sought praise from Shěn Yuē 沈約; Shěn would not extend him patronage, and Zhōng held a grudge — therefore he ranked Shěn in the middle grade. Examining the ranking, placing Shěn in the middle grade is not so much demotion as accurate. But Zhōng’s preface attacks the tone-rule (shēnglǜ) doctrine in vehement terms — fēng yāo hè xī 蜂腰鶴膝 (“wasp-waist, crane-knee” — two of Shěn’s eight prosodic faults), he says, “I am ill-equipped to follow”; shuāng shēng dié yùn 雙聲疊韻 (“alliteration and rhyming”) “have already been well handled in vernacular usage” — these are direct attacks on Shěn’s theory, plain to see. The criticism is not wholly without basis.

Among the hundred-and-three poets, only Wáng Róng 王融 is referred to by zì — “Wáng Yuáncháng” 王元長 — without his given name. Some have suspected private favoritism. But Xú Líng’s 徐陵 Yùtái xīn yǒng also writes Wáng by zì alone — because between Qí and Liáng he avoided the personal name of Qí Hédì 齊和帝 (also called Róng), so used zì in writing. There is nothing more to it. We have left the original undisturbed and preserve the old reading.

Abstract

The Shīpǐn belongs to the great age of Liáng-court literary theory at Jiànkāng 建康 — the same intellectual climate that produced the Wénxīn diāolóng (c. 502) and Xiāo Tǒng’s 蕭統 Wén xuǎn 文選 (c. 526). Zhōng’s central project is the assessment of wǔyán shī 五言詩 (pentasyllabic verse) — the dominant lyric form of his age — across the period from the Gǔshī shíjiǔ shǒu 古詩十九首 and Hàn anonymous corpus down to his contemporaries. The 122 (or 123) named poets are distributed unevenly: eleven (some count twelve) figures sit in the shàng pǐn 上品, including Lǐ Líng 李陵, Bān Jiéyú 班婕妤, Cáo Zhí 曹植, Liú Zhēn 劉楨, Wáng Càn 王粲, Ruǎn Jí 阮籍, Lù Jī 陸機, Pān Yuè 潘岳, Zhāng Xié 張協, Zuǒ Sī 左思, and — most famously — Xiè Língyùn 謝靈運. The zhōng pǐn and xià pǐn hold the remainder. Each entry pairs a verdict (often two characters: gāo yǎ 高雅, qí jùn 奇峻, etc.) with a genealogical assertion — for example, Cáo Zhí “derives from the Guófēng”; Lǐ Líng’s poems “derive from the Chǔ cí”; Lù Jī “derives from Cáo Zhí”. The genealogical apparatus is the Shīpǐn’s most original feature and at the same time the feature the Sìkù editors find most strained.

The preface to the upper grade contains the Shīpǐn’s theoretical core: a sustained attack on Shěn Yuē’s 沈約 Sì shēng bā bìng 四聲八病 doctrine (the systematized tone-rules of the Yǒngmíng style), in favor of an aesthetic of zhí xún 直尋 — direct seizure of the immediate poetic intuition without metrical hypercorrection. The preface also introduces the famous critical pair bǐ 比 / xìng 興 (comparison / evocation) — extending what was originally a Shī jīng exegetical category to lyric theory generally — and the concept of zī wèi 滋味 (“flavor”, “savor”), the sensuous-affective quality by which good verse can be told from bad. The Sòng critics (especially Yán Yǔ 嚴羽 in the Cānglàng shīhuà KR4i0035) took up much of this vocabulary; through them it entered the standard repertory of Chinese poetics.

Textual transmission is well-attested. The Suíshū Jīngjízhì and the two Táng catalogues all record a three-juǎn edition. The earliest extant printing is the Yuán Zhìyuán 至元 18 (1281) Shī shī anthology, where the Shīpǐn is included; the earliest stand-alone printing is the Míng Lìdài shīhuà 歷代詩話 edition (in He Wénhuàn’s 何文煥 great compilation, 1770). The Sìkù edition was based on an “internally held copy” of unknown provenance. There is significant textual variation between the He Wénhuàn recension and the Sìkù — most consequentially in the position of certain poets and in the absence/presence of a few late figures (Jiāng Yān 江淹, Wáng Jīn 王巾) — and the modern critical editions of Chén Yánjié 陳延傑 (1958) and Cáo Xù 曹旭 (1994) negotiate these.

Translations and research

  • John Timothy Wixted, “The Nature of Evaluation in the Shih-pin (Gradings of Poets) by Chung Hung (A.D. 469–518)”, in Susan Bush and Christian Murck, eds., Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton, 1983), 225–264.
  • John Timothy Wixted, “Shipin”, in Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (IEAS, Berkeley, 2015) — the standard English-language bibliographical guide entry.
  • Yeh Chia-ying and Jan W. Walls, “Theory, Standards, and Practice of Criticizing Poetry in Chung Hung’s Shih-p’in”, in Ronald C. Miao, ed., Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics (San Francisco, 1978), 43–80.
  • Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), 73–82 and 595–597 — annotated partial translation of the prefaces.
  • Cáo Xù 曹旭, Shīpǐn jí zhù 詩品集注 (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1994; rev. 2011) — the principal modern Chinese critical edition.
  • Chén Yán-jié 陳延傑, Shīpǐn zhù 詩品注 (Rénmín wénxué, 1958; rev. 1961).
  • Wáng Shū-mín 王叔岷, Zhōng Róng Shīpǐn jiàn zhèng gǎo 鍾嶸詩品箋證稿 (Academia Sinica, 1992) — 600-page variorum with exhaustive Sinological apparatus.
  • Brigitta Lee, Imitation, Remembrance and the Formation of the Poetic Past: Studies in the Early Medieval Chinese Reception of Tao Yuanming (Stanford, 2007) — extensive use of the Shīpǐn as evidence for Tao’s zhōng pǐn placement.

Other points of interest

The Shīpǐn’s placement of Táo Qián 陶潛 in the zhōng pǐn is the most famously contested grading in the entire tradition. Zhōng calls Tao “the founder of all yǐn yì 隱逸 (recluse) poets” — but ranks him only second-class. Later critics from the Sòng onward took this as a basic error and the locus classicus for arguments about the limits of contemporary judgment. — The ranking of Shěn Yuē in the zhōng pǐn gave rise to the persistent (and probably true) tradition that Zhōng was settling a personal score after Shěn refused him patronage. — The work is also a major source for Han-Wei poems otherwise lost: a number of the poems Zhōng quotes are recoverable from no other transmission.

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