Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o by Su Shi
Published 1101 · 30,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o to read?
Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 66 out of 100
- Song poetic diction with heavy historical and Buddhist allusion, official terminology and technical vocabulary from painting, calligraphy and medicine.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Regulated verse, ci lyrics and rhapsody prose in the same volume, each with different grammatical conventions and degrees of ellipsis.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- The Red Cliff rhapsodies argue about permanence and possession directly, and the philosophical reflection runs through the exile poems.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Allusion-dense in the Song manner, expecting the reader to catch references to Cao Cao, Tao Yuanming and Buddhist sutras in passing.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- Su Shi's speaking voice is candid, though the political poems say their real business under a description of weather or crops.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The river, the moon, the eastern slope and the returning boat are stable figures that carry his argument about impermanence.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- He jokes constantly about his own disgrace, and the trial that exiled him was built on reading his descriptions of farming as attacks on policy — a reading that was not wrong.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The rhapsodies end in a shared drink and a fallen-asleep boat rather than a settled conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A translator's selection spanning three genres and forty years, with no arrangement by the author.
How Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o is regarded
Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.