LI SHANG-YIN

(c. 813 to 858)

LI SHANG-YIN IS traditionally described as the last great poet of the T’ang Dynasty, and his work represents a departure in Chinese poetry for two primary reasons. First is his interest in romance, a subject that had rarely appeared in Chinese poetry, except in the yüeh-fu tradition of stock female figures. Romance had begun to appear in the work of Tu Mu and Li Ho, but with Li Shang-yin it becomes a central preoccupation, though in the more experimental poems translated here, it appears primarily as a sensuous atmosphere. And after Li, romance and eroticism continued as the principal concern of tz’u, a new form of poetry written by courtesans and their male admirers (see here).

Li Shang-yin’s second innovation is the way his poems create more a mood or atmosphere than a clear statement. Li thought a poem should embody the mysterious origins (literally “dark-enigma,” for which see Key Terms: hsüan) and inner patterns (see Key Terms: li) of the cosmos. Although he wrote many conventional and straightforward poems, his most innovative poems succeed in this aspiration: they are so mysterious, in fact, that it is often impossible to say just what they are about. In Li’s most important and experimental poems—many of which offer no title to help orient the reader—this elusiveness is created by the surprising juxtaposition of discontinuous ideas and images, a poetics of collage or fragmentation that feels especially modern.

Many critics over the centuries have argued that Li’s poems are commentaries on either contemporary politics, his romantic intrigues, or his relationships to powerful patrons. They have assumed that the poems are saying something clear but in a veiled way, because he is either criticizing the political establishment or writing about clandestine love affairs. There is no doubt some truth to this, but as a poet calculating each gesture and its effect, Li clearly intended a poetry of elusive ambiguity, and that elusiveness is indeed the work’s great strength.

The most discussed and debated aspect of Li’s enigmatic work is how thick with allusion it is. All Chinese poets used allusions to literary or historical precedents to enrich their writing, but in his more experimental poems, Li Shang-yin pushed this practice to its limit. Nearly every line contains some kind of literary or historical reference. However, in the more radical poems, those references do not form a unified system that resolves a poem’s ambiguities into a clear statement. They are as fragmented as the poem’s immediate ideas and images, so they simply add another layer of elusiveness, one that is not available to us without losing the poems in a flood of scholarly explanation. Reading these poems in translation, one can imagine behind every strange image a strange story, and that is enough to experience the overall effect of the poems, for they are not poems that depend on allusion for their meaning but symbolist poems that create their own mysterious worlds. In doing this, they fulfill Li’s primary intent: to both suggest and frustrate coherence. This poetics offers the reader depths beyond the conventional self, which is shaped by linguistic coherence. It represents Li’s Taoist/Ch’an (Zen) practice in the poetic realm, opening that space between linguistic coherence and silence, where the human blends into the mysterious origins and inner patterns of the cosmos.