At 502 pages, 1,015 footnotes, 228 translations, and a price of $170, this monograph by Stuart Sargent on the shi poetry of He Zhu (1052–1125) is substantial by any measure. Rarely does one encounter a work of such meticulousness that it threatens to overwhelm the reader with data. (I learned on p. 17, for instance, that 11.16 percent of Hebei West Circuit was irrigated in 1076). Sargent is impeccable in tracking down variant readings, locating where a poem was composed, explaining contemporary political events, and discussing secondary scholarship. There is so much information packed into this book that the reader soon yearns for generalizations to corral the stampede of facts. The exasperating quality of this book—and its genius—is that Sargent offers no easy way out of the welter. In his words, “If we reduce each poet to one or two ideas or features that fit into a received narrative of literary development, we both efface the complexity of the individual poet and obscure other lines of development waiting to be discovered” (p. 454). He Zhu was an erudite, multifaceted poet. This book, surely the hard-won result of many years of research, reflects that in its form. It is a series of readings of He Zhu's collected shi poetry through the lens of genre with accurate (and beautiful) translations, lucid metrical notations, copious annotations, and discussions of the contexts of the poems informed by a deep knowledge of He Zhu's contemporaries, especially Su Shi. Sargent has produced a definitive work that will not be superseded precisely because it refuses to synthesize without sufficient data.

Sargent takes He Zhu's own grouping of his shi poems by genre as a structuring principle, with chapters on (1) ancient-style verse, (2) songs, (3) pentametrical regulated verse, (4) heptametrical regulated verse, (5) pentametrical quatrains, and (6) heptametrical quatrains. He then works through each group chronologically, covering the years 1075–98 in full or in part through six iterations. As Sargent notes on his very first page, he must base his readings and statistics on a small surviving selection of 572 poems, edited and revised by the poet himself, drawn from the 5,000–6,000 poems that he likely wrote during his lifetime. Sargent realizes that a “complete picture” of He Zhu is “forever beyond our reach” (p. 453), but that does not stop him from attempting a complete picture of the poems that are left to us; everything else extrinsic to the texts emerges in passing in Sargent's exegesis for each poem. The reader is able to gradually piece together larger mosaics, although they will always be riddled with stubborn lacunae.

There are at least three books—all worthy of purchase—in this one monograph. The first is a collection of beautifully rendered and exhaustively annotated translations of almost half of He Zhu's extant shi poems, no mean feat given the diversity of his style and the depth of his erudition. Each translation is accompanied by the original text, metrical notation, detailed notes, and a discussion of its context. He Zhu helped out a great deal by carefully dating his poems and writing a headnote for each one. Sargent often refers to these notes but rarely quotes them in their entirety, which is unfortunate given their richness as a source but understandable because of constraints of space.

The second book is an exhaustive discussion of prosody in medieval Chinese poetry. Sargent combines an ingenious metrical notation system with a classification scheme adopted from a scholar named Qi Gong to graphically represent the tonal structure of each poem, making patterns and violations readily apparent. Unlike most other Western scholars, Sargent spends a great deal of time discussing the links between tonal structure, style, and meaning in a poem, adding a fertile layer to his interpretation.

The third book is a sensitive analysis of genre and occasion in Song poetry. Sargent views genre in purely formal terms, but he usefully conceives of it as “one of the ‘contexts’ in which a poet must write,” in addition to topics, situations, literary and intellectual practice and extra-literary events (p. 3). He uncovers the links between a particular occasion (or nonoccasion) and the genre appropriate to it (p. 272), although his emphasis is always on the text at hand rather than on its social context (p. 369).

After perusing this dense work, the reader may be disappointed by the tentative and qualified nature of its conclusions regarding He Zhu's innovations. But Sargent does not envision his book as the final word; rather, his conclusions illustrate his “belief that another type of research has to be pursued further before we can write a more adequate history of Song poetry, or indeed of all post-Tang shi poetry” (p. 454). This book is a sound brick in the foundation of an edifice yet to be built.