In the voluminous traditional commentaries on classical Chinese poetry, one can hardly avoid running into witticisms in imagistic language, often high-sounding, sometimes thought-provoking, and always metaphorical. For example, when asked about the verse structure of the “Nineteen Old Poems,” the Qing critic Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711) sighed that the versification of the oeuvre “is as seamless as a heavenly garment, impossible for one to learn to make” 如天衣無縫，不可學已.1
Unsatisfied with Wang's nebulous insight, Fang Dongshu 方東樹 (1772–1851) tries to examine this “heavenly garment” by touching on its texture:
When ancients did calligraphy, every forward movement of their brush must be followed by a backward withdrawal, and there is no downward movement that is not encountered by an upward retraction. Every brush stroke is brisk like a startled wild goose or resilient like a dragon. If you use calligraphy as an analogy to search for the art of composition and...
