A Review Of Tang Shi Bai Hua By Zhe-cun In Perspective Commentary

Tang poetry is a term, which is embedded in the memory of Chinese people. QUAN TANG SHI contains more than two thousand of poets and over fifty thousand of poems. It is difficult to eulogize even the most pristine distillate of them due to the tremendous volume. From Tang dynasty on, consecutive selectors and their works appear and many masterpieces emerge among them. TANG SHI BAI HUA is not only Shi Zhe-cun's first academic monograph after his fifty years fading in the literary world, but also the most important works in his last twenty five years. The book is reprinted and edited many times since its publication, and some famous universities such as Yale take it as the text book for Chinese courses. This phenomenon is peerless in the history of selecting Tang poetry. Although the theory of selecting Tang poems is deeply studied, which makes this field nearly a blasted tree, TANG SHI BAI HUA becomes a new branch with four flowers budded from it and implies the spring of the old tree.This paper investigates the book TANG SHI BAI HUA in view of commentary. We characterize its feature and try to research the cultural background of it deeply. The whole paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the book TANG SHI BAI HUA. The second chapter expounds its feature different from other works selecting Tang poems from four aspects, that is, avoiding familiarity choosing singularity; emphasizing meanings rather than phrases; taking entirety instead of excellent ones; explaining the profound things in a simple way. The last chapter explores the academic foundation of these four flowers by associating with the so called"Four Windows"of SHI Zhe-cun.