View/Open - University of Victoria
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View/Open - University of Victoria
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104<br />
Conclusion<br />
This chapter opened with an overview <strong>of</strong> concerns regarding the potential problems inherent in<br />
assigning both a body <strong>of</strong> texts and writers to the subgenre “frontier poetry”. With “frontier poetry” as a<br />
thematic category open to variations in its definition, the very act <strong>of</strong> declaring a text as belonging under<br />
the mantle <strong>of</strong> the sub-genre is never inviolate nor free from possible protestations. Also, by ascribing<br />
individual poets to the “frontier poetry” subgenre, as is <strong>of</strong>ten the case with Cen Shen and Gao Shi,<br />
other texts by these writers that are impossible to insert into the “frontier” paradigm may be left<br />
neglected, hidden under a shadow cast by the dominant image <strong>of</strong> the “frontier poet”.<br />
While mindful <strong>of</strong> the precariousness <strong>of</strong> thematic paradigms, the remainder <strong>of</strong> this chapter<br />
nonetheless continued to work within Xiao Chengyu's framework <strong>of</strong> frontier poetry to demonstrate how<br />
several poets <strong>of</strong> the High Tang period brought the subgenre to its creative pinnacle. Such an<br />
accomplishment was due in part to the personal involvement <strong>of</strong> many poets, in particular Cen Shen and<br />
Gao Shi, with the subject matter <strong>of</strong> their texts, writing from both the perspective <strong>of</strong> lived experiences<br />
and traditional approaches to rendering China's borderlands – its military confrontations, local peoples<br />
and terrain – into verse. In some instances, the intimacy between subject matter and experience allowed<br />
poets serving on the frontier, and not simply imagining the borderlands <strong>of</strong> China's peripheral regions, to<br />
present a broad range <strong>of</strong> responses to their employment as well as the broader martial, geographical and<br />
cultural atmosphere within which they were immersed.