Abstract:

Today’s research on QIAN Zhong-shu must respond to three sensitive points. First, does QIAN, as the crystallization of classical culture and the most extensive reader in the 20th century, have a relatively focused discipline foundation in his lifelong works? Second, are QIAN’s works （especially Guan Zui Bian）, which seems to be not systematic despite of their being knowledgeable and filled with gifted insights, essentially like “scattering money and losing strings”? Third, is QIAN content to be an exquisite scholar who appreciates poetic taste, rather than an outstanding aesthetician who explores the charm of literature and goes deep into the history of literature and art and the history of criticism? The answers are as follows. First, dubbed as the “Kunlun of culture”, i.e., a giant in the cultural field, QIAN’s carried out his studies through ancient and modern times at home and abroad. However, there was a discipline foundation in his intellectual career in which he has invested most talent, energy, and time. This is “the modern transformation of classical poetics”, or “the new interpretation of classical poetics”. In QIAN’s view, Canglang Shihua compiled by YAN Yu in the Southern Song Dynasty is the ideal literature of critical history with the richest intellectual connotations. Second, after ten years’ or decades’ intensive reading, one can find out that QIAN’s “new interpretation of classical poetics” has its own self-consistent logic: By examining “writing”, “wording”, “talent, knowledge, insight”, “romantic charm”, “literary style” and “origin analysis” step by step, he has restructured the “doctrine of the original position of poetry”, “poetic molecules”, the “doctrine of the cultivation of poets”, the “idea that the value of poems lies in clearness and remoteness”, the stance of “dividing poetry mainly into Tang and Song poems” and the “ethics of poetry”, sparkling with brilliant modern poetic rays. Third, it is easy to draw the conclusion that QIAN is worthy of the title of a great scholar in the history of Chinese literature and art and the history of criticism.

Key words: Canglang Shihua, “talent, knowledge and insight”, QIAN Zhong-shu, poet cultivation