This chapter presents poems from both parts of the Song dynasty, the Northern
Song (960–1127) and the Southern Song (1127–1279). The latter period began with
the invasion of the Jurchen armies in the 1120s and the consequent withdrawal
of the Chinese court to the south and loss of the northern half of the empire to
foreign rule. More important to our discussion than the military weakness of the
Song, however, is the fact that it was during this period that book printing be-
came widespread in China. Largely for that reason, the amount of writing that
survives from the three hundred years of the Song surpasses by far that of any
previous dynasty; probably it exceeds the total of all the previous dynasties. The
amount of Song dynasty shi poetry is staggeringly large. Some 200,000 poems
survive, composed by nearly 10,000 authors. (Quantitatively, at least, shi is the
major Song poetic genre, dwarfing in size the younger and less prestigious form of
the ci [song lyric].) Very few people can have read all of the shi corpus. The quantity
of shi poetry produced is so daunting that it was not until the end of the twentieth
century that anyone set about to collect all of it. It required a national effort by a
team of dozens of scholars in China and ten years of editorial labor to complete the
project: Complete Shi Poetry of the Song (Quan Song shi).1
The poetry of the preceding great dynastic period, the Tang, is by comparison
more manageable and much better known. There has been a Complete Shi Poetry
of the Tang (Quan Tang shi) since 1706—that is, for three hundred years—and it
is less than one-quarter as voluminous.2 The literary history and criticism of Tang
poetry is well developed. The serious study of Song poetry as a whole is still in its
initial stages.
Nevertheless, it has long been fashionable, ever since the Song itself, for poets
and critics to think of the poetry of the Song as stylistically distinct from that of the
Tang, and to debate its merits relative to the earlier work. It was both the good for-
tune and a handicap for Song literati to live after the Tang, with all its achievements
in literature. Whatever Song writers produced would inevitably be compared with
that from the earlier great age of literary history, often unfavorably. But the high
repute of Tang poetry also spurred Song writers to explore new modes of poetic
expression, which give Song poetry its own distinctive feel. The innovations are
many and go in several directions, some of them seemingly contradictory. They
include increased attention to the mundane aspects of daily life, the expectation
that poetic diction is not without precedent in earlier verse, the accommodation of
a large amount of intellectual thought or content, and a shying away from the overt
❀ 15 ❀
Shi Poetry
Ancient and Recent Styles