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Analyzing Cen Shen's frontier poetry with attention to the poet-narrators' modes and facets of
focalization invites an opportunity to appreciate the mechanics of perception operating in the poetry,
both at the level of what is perceived and how the world of the poem is perceived. Such a reading
immediately, intimately and sensually draws the reader into experiencing a poetic space often lost in
allegorical or biographically driven exegeses. While certainly worthwhile angles of approach in their
own right, the traditional motivation of “reading the poem to know the poet”, for instance, often
neglects explicating the subtleties involved in the poet-narrator's process of conveying the world of the
poem, and at times his own emotional state through such conveyances, and chooses instead to devote
attention towards identifying the product – the poet's supposed feelings and attitudes – of perceptual
processes and not the manner of each process itself. But when an exegetical effort is made, as has been
done in the second part of this thesis, to look at both emerging patterns of perception repeated across
different texts, and how in some instances (as discussed in chapter six) acts of perception themselves
bespeak certain emotional states, the pleasure of reading the multifaceted processes of perception itself
within the poems becomes possible while a stronger evidential foundation also forms for arguing a
particular mindset of the poet-narrator as communicated through a poem's focalization.
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Possibilities
In short, this thesis began with a discussion in chapters one through three of the historical,
literary and experiential factors involved in the evolution of frontier poetry during the Tang period, and
then refined its analysis to revealing intertextual patterns of focalization in a selection of Cen Shen's
frontier verse. The theoretical model used in this thesis to investigate focalization in Cen Shen's poetry
may have further applications when researching the relationship between perceiving agents (focalizers)
and the perceived (focalized) in poems concerned with perception itself. Whether it is poems replete
with shifts between imaginary and ordinary modes of perception, or works where the world described