Chinese Poetic Writing & A Little Primer of Tu Fu | Rain Taxi

Pure orientalist hogwash:

Cheng additionally explores the inherent Chinese “link between poetry
and cosmology,” laying out a clear argument “that the Chinese poetic
language, in its structure, embodies the very laws which rule cosmology
as it was conceived of in Chinese thought.” Zhong Hong’s poetic treatise
Shi Pin is enticingly cited: “song is a light which
illuminates the Three Spirits (Man-Earth-Heaven) as well as the ten
thousand creatures. Thus, it constitutes an offering to the spirits, and
makes manifest the hidden mystery. For upsetting Heaven and Earth, for
moving the Gods, nothing equals poetry.” This mounts a strong argument
for just how inseparably entwined poetry and spirituality are for the
Chinese, representing a holism between poet-text-world that is embedded
directly into the language: “To suppress the gratuitous and arbitrary at
all levels of the system, a semiotic system founded upon an intimate
relationship with the real, so that there is no rupture between signs
and the world, and hence none between man and the universe: such would
be the constant direction of the Chinese.”