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