The Poetics of Perceiving Things: The Birth of a New Category of Poetics

In Chinese and Western intellectual histories, there are numerous poetic theories about how poets compose poetry through the perception of things. Despite that these poetics tellingly belong to the same category, they have neither been named nor theoretically recapitulated. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper calls it the poetics of perceiving things(ganwu shixue 感物诗学) and defines it as a poetic category that explores the process of poets creating poetry by/after perceiving things, which tends to consist of two parts: the subject and the object. To determine the scope of the poetics of perceiving things, it is necessary to understand the variables that lead to the differences within this category of poetics and where its boundaries lie. To this end, this paper compares Rilke's poetics of Dinggedichte, Liu Xie's poetics of the intermingling of mind and things, and Wang Guowei's poetics of “the realm with me”(youwozhijing 有我之境) and “the realm without me”(wuwozhijing 无我之境) from two perspectives: the object and the subject. The article demonstrates that in terms of the object, Rilke attaches great importance to the elimination of the contingency of objects, keeping only necessary properties, thereby revealing the essence of the object and highlighting its being; Liu Xie and Wang Guowei, however, do not bother with this kind of demarcation. The contingency of objects figures prominently in Liu Xie's poetics, while Wang Guowei's poetic “realm with me” even intentionally imposes the poet's subjectivity on the object to foreground the latter's contingency; Wang would not eliminate the contingency of objects even when it comes to his more objective idea of the “realm without me.” In terms of the subject, Rilke's Dinggedichte can be deemed as the poetics of the eyes, while Liu Xie's and Wang Guowei's poetics take the heart as the fundamental sensory organ. The different conceptions of subject and object in light of the four types of poetics point to different degrees of subjectivity and objectivity, and thus to different status of subject and object presence: Rilke's Dinggedichte emphasizes the essence of the object, and uses a more objective organ, the eyes, to perceive things. So Rilke's poetics is an extremely objective poetics of perceiving things. In Rilke's Dinggedichte, the subjects are mostly absent; Wang Guowei's “realm without me” is objective, but the “I” is still present and therefore less objective than in Rilke's Dinggedichte; according to this poetic theory, the object is present in the poems. Liu Xie accentuates the need for both the presence of subjectivity and that of objectivity in poetry, so as a poetics of perceiving things, it is overall eclectic but pro-subjective. On another front, Wang Guowei's “realm with me” focuses on the presence of the subject, and is therefore an extremely subjective poetics of perceiving things. The poetics of perceiving things where the subject is present is more subjective, while the poetics of perceiving things where the object is present is more objective. Based on these results, this essay establishes a poetic axis of perceiving things, which visualizes the internal differences and the category scope of the poetic system in a concrete way, and thus officially identifies and establishes the principles of the poetics of perceiving things.