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the country's near abroad, a time when he experienced a creative phase that would produce what have
become his most memorable, and anthologized, works, Cen Shen wrote of a frontier landscape which
could scald, freeze and emotionally wrench apart interlopers from metropolitan China with a
topography of burning mountains, biting winds and achingly endless distances. Although not the
exclusive concern of his frontier verse, the sheer plethora of geographic and meteorological entities
populating Cen Shen's contributions to the frontier school nonetheless easily accommodates analytical
endeavours focusing on the poet's descriptions of and responses to the physical environment of China's
peripheral regions.
These borderland settings have long been regarded by critics as a defining trait of Cen Shen's
frontier poems, as was noted in chapter three of this thesis through Hu Zhenheng's 胡 震 亨 observation
that Cen Shen, in contradistinction to Gao Shi, stresses scene (jing 景 ) in his frontier poetry. The
contemporary age as well has displayed an inclination towards discussing the scenic facet of Cen
Shen's frontier poetry. In an essay centred on the stylistic differences between Gao Shi and Cen Shen's
frontier poetry 3 , Yu Zhengsong 余 正 松 explains how Gao Shi's deep dedication to the human
experience of the frontier, and not the frontier's geological being, was responsible for the paucity in his
collected works of poems in which attention to the hinterlands as a geographic entity dominates a text's
thematic thrust. Yu continues to claim that when the setting itself does have a noticeable presence in
Gao Shi's frontier poems, the intellectual and emotional concerns of the poet-narrator overpowers the
imagery of the landscape. This adoption of setting as a means of self-expression then leads to
geographic descriptions fraught with generalities and imprecision, descriptions that otherwise might
have been meticulously rendered had they not been mere vehicles pronouncing the poet's sentiments. 4
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3 Yu Zhengsong 余 正 松 “Gao Cen shu huan bu, Shen Bao de tong xing: Gaoshi yu Cen Shen shifeng zhi yitong 高 岑 殊
缓 步 , 沈 鲍 得 同 行 : 高 适 与 参 岑 诗 风 之 异 同 ”in Yu Zhengsong 余 正 松 , Gaoshi yanjiu 高 适 研 究 (Chengdu: Ba
Shushushe chuban 巴 蜀 书 社 出 版 ,1992), pp. 227-242.
4 Yu Zhengsong, “Gaoshi yu Cen Shen shifeng zhi yitong”, p. 235. Of course, one also needs to bear in mind that for Tang
poets in their “choice of nature images...the highly specific [was] generally avoided [so that] the natural world