The Poetry of Yuan Haowen

Yuan Haowen 元好問 (1190–1257) is one of the greatest Chinese poets of the past eight hundred years. He is especially famous for his poems lamenting the death and disorder that accompanied the decline, fall, and aftermath of the Jin dynasty, when the Mongols took over North China. Reading Yuan’s poems, one feels his intense pain at the demise of the dynasty and his deeply felt need to preserve the historical and cultural record of civilization as he knew it. The poems are distinguished by breadth of learning, linguistic creativity, and allusive depth. They also reveal an abiding sense of irony, and occasional self-directed wry humor.

John Timothy Wixted’s treatment of 150 of Yuan Haowen’s poems distills available scholarship on the poet in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. The poems—lucidly introduced, interpreted, and explicated—are presented in romanization and translation as well as in the original.

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Some critics have justifiably acclaimed Yuan Haowen to be one of China’s greatest poets. And yet, no monograph on his life and extensive body of extant poetry has been published in English. That is, until now. John Timothy Wixted’s The Poetry of Yuan Haowen: Introduced, Interpreted, Explicated presents translations of 150 selections of Yuan’s most representative poems. The English renditions of the poems read beautifully; the lucid commentary, which distills available scholarship on the poet in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages, will interest China specialists and the general reader. Each verse is accompanied by Pinyin romanization so readers at any level of knowledge in Chinese have direct access to the original text. A significant milestone in the ever-growing corpus of English scholarship on traditional Chinese poetry.

—James M. Hargett, Professor Emeritus, University at Albany, SUNY