ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-century China witnessed crises, transformations, and the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. The first two decades of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) encompassed the end of native Han rule and the establishment of an alien Manchu regime;1 they produced a remarkable body of poetry that has until recently been overlooked in favor of the works of Wang Shizhen 王士禛 (1634-1711) and his school, its immediate successors. Wang’s aesthetic of shenyun 神韻, “spirit resonance,” has at times been counted as the sole contribution of the middle and latter seventeenth century to Chinese verse. Yet in early-Qing poetry we find a very different ethos, one that reaches its most characteristic expression in the works of Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582-1664), this study’s subject.2 The essence of shenyun, described as “metaphysical” by James J. Y. Liu, is “an ineffable personal tone or flavor in one’s poetry,”3 borne out in such manners as “detachment” and “restrained beauty.”4 The ethos of the poetry in the prior twenty years demands, by contrast, a collective, almost fervent effort to record and understand ongoing historical events, an effort often characterized by the pathos of introspection, retrospection, and mourning for the past. This pathos is most clearly expressed in the verse of the survivors of the Ming-Qing political changeover, particularly from those of Ming yimin 明遺民, the Ming loyalists (see below). It translates into what I shall call the poetics of Ming loyalism or the Ming loyalist poetics. This mode of writing develops a public narrative out of the mediated history of the perished Ming and Southern Ming resistance (1644-62) through the power of personal memory in its vicissitudes. Its chief material is the recollection of individual and cultural loss. The poetics of Ming loyalism is at once the sequel of a catastrophic experience and the witness to a strange, new world coming into being. The poetry of the Ming-Qing transition is distinguished by its intense focus on history, its manifest historical consciousness. The preoccupation with historical memory in these decades is phenomenal and owed as much momentum to historical exigencies as to the influences of such creative writers as Qian Qianyi and Wu Weiye 吳偉業 (1609-72).
