Wen Tingyun

Life

From youth Wen was quick-minded and skilled in poetry and fu rhapsody. Proud in temperament and fond of satirizing the powerful, he offended Chancellor Linghu Tao. He repeatedly failed the jinshi examinations. His examination-room speed became proverbial: he reportedly wrote without a draft, completed one rhyme with each recitation, and produced eight rhymes with eight crossings of his hands, earning the sobriquets Wen Bayin, Wen Bacha, and Wen Bayun.

His travels took him east to Wu and Yue, south to Qian and Wu, and northwest to Xiaoguan and Huizhong. During Emperor Xuanzong’s Dazhong era, he was dismissed for disrupting an examination and made magistrate of Suixian (隨縣; also written 隋縣). When Xu Shang governed Xiangyang, he appointed Wen as a xunguan, and Wen exchanged poems with Duan Chengshi and Wei Chan. After becoming disillusioned, he returned to Jiangdong, later went to Chang’an as assistant instructor at the Directorate of Education, and was demoted to magistrate of Fangcheng before his death; another account says that in the seventh year of Xiantong he was an assistant instructor and ended his life wandering. He exchanged poems and prose with Xu Shang and Linghu Tao.

Literary achievement

Wen was a major lyricist of the late Tang and was also renowned as a poet; he was ranked with Li Shangyin as “Wen and Li.” His lyrics often treated women’s inner chambers and used a richly ornate style, and they were later included in the *Huajian ji*; he was a leading lyricist of the Huajian school, was paired with Wei Zhuang as “Wen and Wei,” and later readers hailed him as the progenitor of that school.

His poetry was marked by an ornate, intricately wrought, and graceful language, especially in his yuefu pieces. His historical poems often carried satirical or admonitory meanings, poems about women often had tragic overtones, and a small number directly exposed social contradictions; his poetry therefore cannot be dismissed wholesale as merely “seductive and ornate verse.” He was particularly accomplished in regulated verse, whose tonal resonance was clear and whose manner was lofty; works such as “Passing the Tomb of Chen Lin” and “On the Fifth Pass at Wuzhangyuan” are examples. His brief landscape poems were fresh and appealing, and the lines “The cock crows, the thatched inn under the moon; / Frost on the plank bridge, traces of human feet” from “An Early Morning Journey at Shangshan” were long celebrated.

Later critics variously praised his brilliant talent, clear tonal quality, and unfailingly polished diction, or faulted his poetry as beautiful but insubstantial and ornate without breadth; they also disagreed over the relative merits of his yuefu songs, contemporary-style verse, and longer poems. His poetic style, together with those of Li Shangyin and Duan Chengshi, was known as the “Three-Six Style,” because all three ranked sixteenth in their families.

Works

His lost collections included 《握蘭集》 in three juan, 《金筌集》 in ten, 《詩集》 in five, and 《漢南真稿》 in ten; 《金筌集》 is also written 《金荃集》. His lyrics survive in 《花間集》 and 《金奩集》, and Wang Guowei compiled 《金荃詞》 in one juan. The extant 《溫飛卿集》 consists of seven juan with a separate one-juan collection, while the *Quan Tang shi* contains nine juan of his poetry; its supplements add one poem and six fragmentary lines.

A more complete annotated edition of his poetry was assembled and successively supplemented and revised by Zeng Yi, Gu Yuxian, and Gu Sitli: 《溫飛卿詩集箋注》 contains nearly 330 poems. Other works attributed to him include the one-juan 《採茶錄》, 《乾𦠆子》, 《乾𦠆子佚文》, and 《靚妝錄》.