"Over the centuries, early Chinese classical poetry became embedded in a chronological account with great cultural resonance and came to be transmitted in versions accepted as authoritative. But modern scholarship has questioned components of the account and cast doubt on the accuracy of received texts. The result has destabilized the study of early Chinese poetry. This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. First, it examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged, with some poems attached to authors and some not. By setting aside putative differences of author and genre, Stephen Owen argues, we can see that this was “one poetry,” created from a shared poetic repertoire and compositional practices. Second, it considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry. As Owen shows, early poetry comes to us through reproduction—reproduction by those who knew the poem and transmitted it, by musicians who performed it, and by scribes and anthologists—all of whom changed texts to suit their needs."

This study of poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. examines extant material synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged. It also considers how scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.

"This innovative textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers—including those with no knowledge of Chinese—as close as possible to the texture of the poems in their original language. The first two chapters introduce the features of classical Chinese that are important for poetry and then survey the formal and rhetorical conventions of classical poetry. The core chapters present the major poets and poems of the Chinese poetic tradition from earliest times to the lyrics of the Song Dynasty (960–1279).Each chapter begins with an overview of the historical context for the poetry of a particular period and provides a brief biography for each poet. Each of the poems appears in the original Chinese with a word-by-word translation, followed by Michael A. Fuller’s unadorned translation, and a more polished version by modern translators. A question-based study guide highlights the important issues in reading and understanding each particular text.Designed for classroom use and for self-study, the textbook’s goal is to help the reader appreciate both the distinctive voices of the major writers in the Chinese poetic tradition and the grand contours of the development of that tradition."

" The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura. In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary history of the Tang that he began in his works on the Early and High Tang. Focusing in particular on Du Mu, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun, he analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. The Late Tang, Owen argues, forces us to change our very notion of the history of poetry. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of available choices--styles, genres, the voices of past poets. It was this repertoire that would endure. "

As the essence of Chinese traditional culture, classical Chinese poetry in Singapore played a very important role in the social and cultural development of Singapore’s Chinese community. Numerous poems depicted the unique scenery of tropical rainforest and the customs with a Nanyang flavor, recorded the various historical events from the colonial era, the World War II to the independent nation, and reflected the poets’ multiple feelings. This book sketches out the brief history of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore over a hundred years, and focuses on the complex identity of poets from different generations, the function of literary societies in the construction of cultural space and the influence of modern media on the development of classical Chinese poetry based on the text interpretation. In addition, the author attempts to define different types of poetry writing using diaspora literature and Sinophone literature. The discussion of these topics will not only expand the research horizon of Chinese literature, but also provide a meaningful reference to the studies of the worldwide Chinese overseas, especially in Southeast Asia.

Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.