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friends remain far from the front lines; commentaries, both in laudatory and critical terms, on relations
between soldiers and commanders as well as commanders and the government; expressions of longing
for home and the familiar by those serving on the frontier; descriptions of battle; and complaints over
one's lot as well as exhortations to endure the harsh realities of the country's border regions.
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The second subset of frontier poem themes within the framework are those which discuss the
non-Chinese peoples living near or along the border, their customs, and interactions with people from
China's interior. In terms of volume, frontier works of this type are relatively few and tend to appear in
the later stages of frontier poetry's thematic expansion from poems primarily concerned with warfare
and its consequent, if not always dwelt upon, misery.
The final component in the physiology of frontier poems are works which feature, to varying
degrees with respect to other characteristics, the borderland environment itself. Though numerically
occupying a significant portion of the frontier corpus, these poems with an interest in the geography
and meteorology of China's north and northwestern areas are emotively weaker than that of the other
two pillars of Xiao's tripartite structure 4 . But from an aesthetic perspective, one which draws perceptual
attention to the extreme climates of China's periphery, frontier poems in which the landscape itself is
not merely the passive setting for war or responses to the sorrow it causes but is instead foregrounded
and made an object of rumination, even if the other aspects of frontier are found in the same work as
well, are actually the most representative and recognizable variation of frontier poetry within the
tripartite classification. 5
4 This third type of frontier poetry tends to foreground the frontier landscape, delivering it from serving as the background
to martial actions or as a correlatives for intellectual and emotional musings. Prior to Cen Shen's frontier poems, these
types of foregrounded frontier landscapes are exceedingly rare. Thus, for the purposes of this chapter of the thesis,
illustrations of how the frontier landscape participates in the identification of the subgenre will be restricted to
displaying how the frontier landscape cooperates with other facets of the subgenre in generating frontier poetry.
5 It should be noted that such a defining framework is not without its opponents. Tan Youxue's 谭 优 学 “Biansai shi
fanlun 边 塞 诗 泛 论 ”, while agreeing with the aforementioned scheme of delineating key qualities of frontier poetry
into separate subsets, does demand that authorially, the writer of a frontier poem must have had personal experience on
the frontier; poems whose frontier elements were devised from mere convention and tradition are not, according to Tan,
frontier poetry. See Tan Youxue 谭 优 学 “Biansaishi fanlun 边 塞 诗 泛 论 ”in Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu lunwen xuancui
唐 代 边 塞 诗 研 究 论 文 选 粹 . Although his reference is specific to Tang frontier poems and their division into thematic
subtypes, Ren Wenjing's delineation of the subgenre admits poems composed by those without Tan's prerequisite frontier