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Words Well Put: Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition (review)

At three words, or two or one (depending on your definition of “definition”), the canonical Chinese gloss on poetry—shi yan zhi 詩言志—is perhaps the briefest and cleanest on record. That the key word is a pun adds to its sharpness. However, this is just one way to define poetry.1 There are many other ways, more or less valid, more or less precise, to say what poetry is, whence it comes, and what it does. There may even be, as Wallace Stevens said, a poem within every poem. But whatever else it is or may be, poetry is a shared activity. The Muse sings, but not to herself. Like a tree falling in a Berkeleian forest, a poem to be made real must be read, recited, heard—or overheard (ad J. S. Mill)— by someone, sometime. Acknowledgement of poetry’s affective quality, both moral and emotional, is deeply rooted in China’s traditional culture. This requires understanding, assimilation, and manipulation of the classical language. Mastery would be demonstrated in various ways. But throughout at least the manuscript or pre-print era, up to the tenth or eleventh century (and arguably beyond, though certain emphases changed in the early modern period), such control was incomplete unless one had the ability personally to refashion or add to the tradition in one’s own words, especially in verse. Knowledge should rightly be supplemented by competence. In the book at hand Graham Sanders studies “poetic competence,” which he describes as “the ability of a person to deploy poetic discourse as a means of affecting the attitude and behavior of another