Scholarly evaluations of Su Shi's poetry written in the Yuanyou (1086-1094) period under the reign of Emperor Zhezong have been polarized. Yan Yu, the Southern Song poetic theorist, praised the "Yuanyou poetic style" created by Su Shi and his fellow-poets for its unique representative of the highest achievement of Song poetry, which had no less splendor than Tang poetry. However, from the perspectives of realism and political significance, modern literary historians esteemed most Su Shi's poems written in the periods of Huangzhou (1080-1085) and Linghai (1095-1101); as banished from the imperial court he showed more concerns with the society and people. His poems of the Yuanyou period were therefore considered worthless as they merely manifested his personal feelings and poetic techniqu...[ Read more ]

Scholarly evaluations of Su Shi's poetry written in the Yuanyou (1086-1094) period under the reign of Emperor Zhezong have been polarized. Yan Yu, the Southern Song poetic theorist, praised the "Yuanyou poetic style" created by Su Shi and his fellow-poets for its unique representative of the highest achievement of Song poetry, which had no less splendor than Tang poetry. However, from the perspectives of realism and political significance, modern literary historians esteemed most Su Shi's poems written in the periods of Huangzhou (1080-1085) and Linghai (1095-1101); as banished from the imperial court he showed more concerns with the society and people. His poems of the Yuanyou period were therefore considered worthless as they merely manifested his personal feelings and poetic technique. My thesis will investigate Su Shi's life and poetry in the Yuanyou period from the perspective of poetic form and reevaluate his contribution to Chinese poetry in the literary context of history.

This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter outlines the poetic trends from the Huangzhou to Yuanyou periods, and thus provides a literary and cultural backdrop against which Su Shi's life and poetry unfold. Chapter two examines how Su Shi and his followers, Huang Tingjian, Chen Shidao and others, formed a literary circle in the Yuanyou period and developed a particular poetic style. Deviated from the traditional norm of expressing the self with the emphasis on ethical values, they paid more attention to their aesthetic experience in daily life and rhetoric sophistication. Chapter three analyzes Su Shi's poems in the form of tihua shi (poetic inscriptions to paintings), a major part in his Yuanyou poetry, with the focus on the representation of "leisure" and its aesthetic value. Chapter four discusses Su Shi's intertextual connection to Bai Juyi, the Tang poet who created the poetic "private sphere" in Stephen Owen's sense. In the fifth chapter I will compare Su Shi's Yuanyou poetry as historical development with the "Yuanyou poetic style" as a critical term, and delineate the similarities and differences between them. Finally I will conclude that Su Shi and the Yuanyou poetic style played a significant role in Chinese literary history.