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selection of High Tang poets must be shackled to the “frontier poet” yoke, particularly the names most
equated with the subgenre, Gao Shi and Cen Shen, when only a small portion of their total poetic
output is acknowledged as being “frontier poetry”. 12. One reasonable response, though not explicitly
proposed by Xiao, is the lingering influence of poetic commentary following the Tang. One of the
earliest candidates for forging Cen Shen's adamantine association with frontier poetry can be found in
the Song dynasty text Yanzhou Shihua 彦 周 诗 话 by Xu Yi 许 顗 :
51
“ 岑 参 诗 , 亦 自 成 一 家 。 盖 尝 从 封 常 清 军 , 其 记 西 域 异 事 甚 多 , 如 《 优 钵 罗 花 歌 》,《 热
海 行 》, 古 今 传 记 所 不 载 者 也
13
。”
Cen Shen's poetry is of its own kind. When serving under Genernal Feng Changqing, he
recorded the many strange things of the western region; [they can be found in] such [poems] as
“Song of the Youbenluo 14 Flower” and “Ballad of Hot Lake”, things which since ancient times
had not been passed down and recorded.
Statements such as Xu's can have the deleterious effect of guiding readers into prejudiced and
presumptive approaches to certain poets, compartmentalizing expansive literary output into narrow
categories that dismiss the whole spectrum of a poet's multifaceted voice by only summarizing and
emphasizing select dimensions. While doing so can certainly be useful for analyzing specific
tendencies of a poet's literary efforts, Xiao does still warn readers not to gloss over poets as members of
mutually exclusive subgenres – such as frontier poetry ( 边 塞 诗 ) and landscape poetry ( 山 水 诗 ) – when
the writers themselves were not necessarily composing texts with such categorical entities in mind, and
in many instances produced works for multiple schools which, postmortem, would be embossed with
generic seals.
12
Less than one-sixth for Gao Shi and Cen Shen according to Xiao.
13
Xu Yi 许 顗 (fl. 1111), Yanzhou shihua 彦 周 诗 话 , cited from Hu Yuanren 胡 元 任 , Tiaoxiyuyin conghua 笤 溪 渔 隐 丛 话
(Taipei: Shijie 世 界 , 1976), 9.75. The term 诗 话 (shihua, talks on poetry) refers to “a form of literary criticism that
consists of a critic's comments on various aspects of poetry”. See Adele Rickett's entry in William H. Nienhauser, Jr.,
ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 695.
14
“The plant is probably the flower of the Persian variety of the fig...This blossom [had] never entered Chinese poetry”
until its introduction in Cen Shen's poem. See Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 94.