A Critical Illumination of Poetic Styles

Abstract

What marks a milestone in Chinese literary criticism is the Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (Wenxin diaolong) by Liu Xie (c. 465–532). As read in Chapter  6 on “Illuminating Poetry” (Ming shi), the focus is placed on a tangle of historical and formal issues in Chinese poetry dating from the antiquity to the fifth century. Even though it conducts a brief survey, it bears much significance to the development of Chinese poetics in general and its poetic styles in particular.