No More Learning

Translators have naturally made their selections
as varied as possible, so that many of those who know the poet only in
translation might feel inclined to defend him on this score. According
to Wang An-shih, his two subjects are wine and women. The second does
not, of course, imply love-poetry, but sentiments put into the mouths
of deserted wives and concubines. Such themes are always felt by the
Chinese to be in part allegorical, the deserted lady symbolizing the
minister whose counsels a wicked monarch will not heed.

Such poems form the dullest section of Chinese poetry, and are
certainly frequent in Li's works. But his most monotonous feature
is the mechanical recurrence of certain reflections about the
impermanence of human things, as opposed to the immutability of Nature.
Probably about half the poems contain some reference to the fact that
rivers do not return to their sources, while man changes hour by hour.

The obsession of impermanence has often been sublimated into great
mystic poetry. In Li Po it results only in endless restatement of
obvious facts.

It has, I think, been generally realized that his strength lies not
in the content, but in the form of his poetry. Above all, he was a
song-writer. Most of the pieces translated previously and most of those
I am going to read to-day are songs, not poems. It is noteworthy that
his tombstone bore the inscription, "His skill lay in the writing of
archaic songs. " His immediate predecessors had carried to the highest
refinement the art of writing in elaborate patterns of tone. In
Li's whole works there are said to be only nine poems in the strict
seven-character metre.
Most of his familiar short poems are in the old
style, which neglects the formal arrangement of tones. The value of his
poetry lay in beauty of words, not in beauty of thought. Unfortunately
no one either here or in China can appreciate the music of his verse,
for we do not know how Chinese was pronounced in the eighth century.
Even to the modern Chinese, his poetry exists more for the eye than for
the ear.

The last point to which I shall refer is the extreme allusiveness of
his poems. This characteristic, common to most Chinese poetry, is
carried to an extreme point in the fifty-nine Old Style poems with
which the works begin. Not only do they bristle with the names of
historical personages, but almost every phrase is borrowed from some
classic. One is tempted to quarrel with Wang An-shih's statement that
people liked the poems because they were easy to enjoy. No modern could
understand them without pages of commentary to each poem. But Chinese
poetry, with a few exceptions, has been written on this principle
since the Han dynasty; one poet alone, Po Chu-i, broke through the
restraints of pedantry, erasing every expression that his charwoman
could not understand.

Translators have naturally avoided the most allusive poems and have
omitted or generalized such allusions as occurred. They have frequently
failed to recognize allusions as such, and have mistranslated them
accordingly, often turning proper names into romantic sentiments.

Li's reputation, like all success, is due partly to accident. After
suffering a temporary eclipse during the Sung dynasty, he came back
into favour in the sixteenth century, when most of the popular
anthologies were made. These compilations devote an inordinate space
to his works, and he has been held in corresponding esteem by a public
whose knowledge of poetry is chiefly confined to anthologies.

Serious literary criticism has been dead in China since that time, and
the valuations then made are still accepted.