CH’EN WEI-SUNG

(3 JANUARY 1626–12 JUNE 1682)¹

Ch’en Wei-sung (Ch’i-nien, Chia-ling), a native of Yi-hsing, Kiangsu province, was born into a prominent family, and his father, Ch’en Chen-hui (1605–1656), played an active leadership role in the Fu-she political party in late Ming times. When young, Ch’en Wei-sung received a traditional education, and early in life won a name for himself as a master of Parallel Prose. Those literary skills notwithstanding, he repeatedly failed the civil service examinations. In his early fifties he was invited to participate in the po-hsüeh hung-tz’u examinations, and he finally gained the success that had so long eluded him. He was subsequently appointed to the Hanlin Academy and then assigned to the board of scholars engaged in compiling the official history of the Ming dynasty. Ch’en spent the remainder of his life in Peking, where he associated with the leading literary figures of the time, such as Chu Yi-tsun (q.v.), whom he had known for many years as a fellow poet, and Singde (q.v.).

During the years of his youth and early manhood, Ch’en Wei-sung cultivated the various shih forms of poetry, and he had already achieved a reputation as a promising poet when he began to explore the tz’u genre, which was then undergoing a modest revival after a long period of relative neglect. He soon found this form of poetry to be especially congenial, and over the next several decades he devoted much of his time and energy to the cultivation of that form, thus becoming ultimately the most prolific tz’u poet in all of Chinese literary history. The Hu-hai lou tz’u-chi (The Tz’u Collection of the Pavilion of Lakes and Seas) contains over 1,600 lyrics, the majority of which employ the longer modes which had come into fashion in Sung times. In matters of theme, diction, and general style, the influence of such great Sung dynasty masters as Su Shih (1037–1101) and Hsin Ch’i-chi (1140–1207) is apparent in his poetry. Like those poets, Ch’en Wei-sung refused to be bound by the belief that the tz’u form was best suited to the treatment of delicate boudoir sentiments, of love between the sexes. Instead, he made no distinction between the shih and tz’u forms with respect to subject matter, and thus his lyric poetry treats of such diverse subjects as parting, a wide range of individual emotional states of mind, recollections of the past, natural physical scenes, contemporary affairs, and so forth. In rejecting the tz’u poetics of the Hua-chien school, he also favored a freer, more natural diction over the richly embellished line associated with the early history of the form. In this way, his poetry in this form manifests a vigorous, masculine manner, but one no less lyrical in spirit.

As a vigorous advocate for tz’u poetry and one of its most noted practitioners during the time of its revival in the seventeenth century, Ch’en Wei-sung’s influence on future developments in the form was considerable. He is regarded as the founder of the Yang-hsien school of lyric verse.

(William Schultz)

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1.Lien-che Tu, ECCP, 1:103.