Li Qingzhao Lecture by Ron Egan, UCB

My comment: “In reading Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems, we are conscious of a kind of lingering charm rarely to be found in the works of her contemporaries.  This is because her verse with its rich imagery suggest and hints rather than directly expresses the feeling.  It was perhaps this irresistible charm that the Amerian poet Amy Lowell referred to as the perfume of a poem which she considered   more important than its metrical form.  Found in Jiaosheng Wang's "complete Ci Poems of Li Qingzhao"     Amy Lowell did not think "fragrance" more important than "meter", but in Chinese poems, because she could not read Chinese, she admitted that she would place primacy on  "the perfume".  My paper published in the Royal Asiatic Society Journal, Vol 50. No. 1. in Shanghai, 2010, and presented to Victor Mair's course, by invitation, at Peking University in Beijing in Spring, 2012, concerned this very topic so I am grateful to find this observation in this critical review and translation of Li Qingzhao's poems. I found her commemorative statue in Hangzhou, where she lived out, in obscurity, the last years of her life, having lost the husband she loved so early in life, to tuberculosis.  They used to write poems together, give each other puzzles about ancient bronzes, and seemed to have had a happy marriage. 

Professor Victor Mair in his classroom at Peking University.

Professor Ron Egan, newly arrived at Stanford University, from UC Santa Barbara, is bringing out a new study of Li Qingzhaou, in which he has attempted to expurgate any poems published as her poems in the century after her poems were conclusively published.  He humorously commented that she was very prolific in the Ming and Qing, after her death in the Song, considering the number of poems attributed to her.  He rules out stylistic considerations, but as a scholar, is only calling those poems, hers, which have clear evidence for being so, based on chronology.  He speculates that the Shu poems have a "masculine" quality, in his view, as they are about affairs of state and critical of other poets and of political leaders, and lack the quality of the Ci poems, which are more elegant and refined and display her poetic skills and knowledge. He maintains that she was not creating a persona but was writing out of her experience of loss of her husband, as well as her celebration of their times together.