Tao Yuanming's Poetics of Awkwardness

Abstract

Tao Yuanming (aka Tao Qian, 365–427) is one of the greatest Chinese poets. He is renowned for writing poetry in praise of a bucolic life of simple pleasures. A popular poet during his lifetime, from the eleventh century on he has obtained an iconic status in Chinese cultural tradition. In modern times, Tao Yuanming is the topic of numerous books and articles. Scholars in East Asia primarily focus on Tao’s chronology and the dating of his poems, the interaction of his personality and his poetry and, in recent years, the reception of his poetry over the centuries. In English-language scholarship James R. Hightower and A.R. Davis have provided complete translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems with comprehensive notes and discussions (Hightower 1970; Davis 1984). Stephen Owen’s reading of Tao Yuanming as “the first great poetic autobiographer” challenges the traditional notion of Tao as a transparent, spontaneous poet (Owen 1986, 78). In the twenty-first century, there was a “Tao Yuanming Wave” when three monographs on Tao were published in the span of five years: Tian’s book is the first study ever of how Tao’s poetry has been reshaped by the forces of medieval Chinese manuscript culture, discussing how a different choice of textual variants can lead to a drastically different reading of the poems (Tian 2005); Swartz’s book offers the most detailed history in English of the reception of Tao Yuanming to date and contextualizes his reception in shifting reading paradigms (Swartz 2008); Ashmore uses Tao’s poems about reading Confucian classics, especially the Analects, as a point of entry to explore the poet and the early medieval Chinese classicist tradition (Ashmore 2010). Together these studies have brought Tao Yuanming studies in English to new depths. Several biographies in dynastic histories compiled from the fifth through early seventh centuries provide a sketch of Tao Yuanming’s life, which can also be reconstructed from