The pervasive influence of the Shijing (Book of Poems) and its exegetical traditions on later writers and critics of poetry (and other genres) is universally recognized, if imperfectly understood. In Critics and Commentators, Bruce Rusk explores the relations between the study and exegesis of the Shijing and the writing and criticism of noncanonical poetry, and shows that this influence in fact worked both ways: crucial dimensions of Shijing interpretation, particularly from the eleventh century onward, drew on insights derived from what Rusk terms “secular” poetry.
Two opening chapters lay foundations for the case studies to follow. The first examines the early history through which the term shi took on its doubled reference to entities that were “always related and never identical” (p. 3): initially a term for song lyrics, it became, with increasing specificity from the Han onward, a proper designation (Shi) of the particular collection of...
