ABSTRACT
To modern readers, reading Qian Qianyi is a very involved experience and process-aesthetic and intellectual. Qian proved to be one of the strongest poets of seventeenth-century China, perhaps even in the history of the Chinese lyric. His poetry occasions both pleasure and great intellectual investment. At one moment his verses may indulge the reader with sheer imagistic and metrical delights. Yet at another turn, the intricate implications of his verses forestall an instinctive reading and oblige the reader to reconsider the complexity and richness of every detail.
