ABSTRACT
Renjian cihua includes Wang Guowei’s criticism of the late Tang and Five Dynasties poets Wen Tingyun, Wei Zhuang, Feng Yansi, and Li Yu. Wang’s views on Wen Tingyun are quite different from those of the Qing dynasty critic Zhang Huiyan. Traditional Chinese literary critics like Zhang Huiyan and Wang were not in the habit of giving reasons for their statements about the meanings of particular poems. Both Zhang Huiyan and Wang had good reasons for their claims about the meanings of certain lines, though neither bothered to provide those reasons in their commentaries. Wang was a great talent, and spent his life in relentless pursuit of the truth. But any person will have his limitations. Wang is saying that although Feng Yansi’s poems concerned the passage of time and separation grief, something had changed, and for this reason “the breadth of his writings was considerable.”
