The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang by Stephen Owen
Published 1981 · 130,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Non-Fiction, Literary Criticism, Literary History, Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang to read?
The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang scores 53 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: 65 out of 100
- Owen writes elegant scholarly prose with Chinese literary and historical terms (lüshi, jueju, High T'ang). The vocabulary combines Western literary-critical concepts with Chinese poetic terminology. Translations of Chinese poetry require attention to tonal and formal features explained in context.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Owen's prose is lucid and well-crafted—academic but readable. Close readings of individual poems produce careful, analytically precise sentences. The style is more essayistic than encyclopedic, with graceful transitions between analysis and historical context.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Balances close reading of specific poems with general claims about High T'ang aesthetics, poetic conventions, and literary history. The abstraction level is moderate—Owen moves between particular and general with skill, grounding theoretical claims in textual evidence.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Dense with poetic analysis, historical context, and comparative readings. Each chapter treats a major poet (Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei) comprehensively. The interplay of Chinese originals, translations, and critical commentary demands sustained attention.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Organized by poet and period; the overarching argument about High Tang self-consciousness is stated and systematically demonstrated.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Owen analyzes symbolic structures in Tang poetry rather than importing his own symbolism into critical prose.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest scholarly voice; occasional dry observation about the distance between poetic persona and biographical fact.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each poet-chapter resolves its argument; the period argument is stated in the opening chapter.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Poet-by-poet organization with a framing argument; readers track both individual careers and the larger literary-historical thesis.
How The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang is regarded
The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang holds a literary regard score of 81 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.