Self-representation of Taizong in Poetic Form

The treatise tries to deal with the essence and value of Emperor Taizong's literary writings, "specially those that speak directly to the relationship between cultural form and sovereign power, as well as on the question of how the Tang negotiated dynastic identity through literary stylistics". As a disciple of Prof. Stephen Owen, Dr. Jack W. Chen mentioned his methodology of literary studies mainly was "devoted to close reading of specific works, where attention to historical detail and to literary rhetoric play the central role in coming to an understanding of Taizong's imperial authorship".

Regarded Taizong as a literary character in history of Chinese literature is a great challenge, since his literary achievement was overshadowed easily by his brilliant political image, however, Taizong emerged at the turn of Sui to Tang Dynasty, which is stereotyped as the stretch of Six Dynasties literary style(commonly, courtly poetry, or Palace-style) . What's more, as Dr. Chen mentioned, "Taizong's real literary achievement, and one might argue, his originality, lay in his realization that poetry as a public text could manifest the sovereign's self-figuration and representation. His poems are marked by a density of historical and classical allusion that speaks to the imperial desire to represent the sovereign and the newly founded dynasty in such a way that it would conform to the traditional models of the sage-kings in high antiquity and the celebrated rulers of the past." In his monograph, Dr. Chen tried to reveal the cause and reason why Taizong wanna reformed his imagery in the literary imagination. After brief introduction of Taizong's reign, he focuses on cultural context and Taizong's essays, rhapsody and poems to find the critical factors. Indeed, after his discourse, something interesting and convincing occurred, such as, his conscious performance to shape his image to historical audience, his ASKĒSIS to his sovereignty conforming to the role of the sage-kings, his taboo to mention the Xuanwu Gate violence and his father's abdication, rewriting his history of sovereignty in poetic form, interaction between his courtly poem and his courters, tensions(or out of control by temptation) between the aims of poetry and moral discourse(specially, "The Imperial Capital Poems"), and so on.

Unfortunately, the deficiency of his monograph shows as follow, Firstly, it focuses the historical context in length, part of the chapters dealt with the intellect, political, ritual strategy of the former sovereigns at the Pre-T'ang Dynasty, it seems a little discursive in the main topic on "The Poetics of Sovereignty On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty", since it may help to draw a safe conclusion from the experience of all sovereigns. As far as the poetics of Taizong's sovereignty is concerned, it lays insufficient analysis on itself. In additional, it has no explicit definition on the "poetics" (here majority connects with politics and sovereignty) by textual reading on various literary genres not limited poems composition themselves, something covers much more historical texts, which makes the readers confusing frequently. Finally, although Dr. Chen has devoted great endeavor to the literal translation from the obscure original literary Chinese into English, while actually, the "closing reading" and "cultural/rhetoric analysis" are inadequate, from where I stand.