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Being Mild and Gentle, Sincere and Broadminded 141

cold water poured on your back and you are suddenly shocked, then they are
poems characterized by stimulation, contemplation, communication, and criti-
cism; otherwise, they are not.” (Xu, 1983, p. 482) Xu Wei believed that only these
poems were good ones. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Liao Yan (廖燕
1644–1705), He Yisun (贺贻孙 1605–1688) and Huang Zongxi, felt deep pain at the
fall of the Ming Dynasty, and refused to serve as officials and reflected upon the
lessons of the Ming Dynasty. They wrote poetry about the pain of the fall of the
dynasty, advocating the beauty of sadness and anger, and despising the beauty of
harmony. Huang Zongxi experienced the late Ming social upheaval and the defeat
of the Ming Dynasty by the Qing Dynasty. When the Qing troops invaded south, he
had recruited volunteers in an attempt to support the Ming Dynasty. After the
failure, he refused to serve as officials for the Qing court. He lived in the coun-
tryside where he wrote and taught. These experiences left the marks of time on his
poetry and poetry education. Therefore, he promoted the ballads of changes and
the court hymns changes. In “The Preface to the Poems of Wan Zhenyi,” (《万贞一诗
)
序》Huang Zongxi rhetorically asked, “Joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness are the
feelings naturally arising from external objects. Why are joy and happiness
considered part of the concept of being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded
while anger and sorrow are not?” He did not simply advocate changing Ballads and
Court Hymns, but rather advocated strong love and hate, so that poets would dare
to express anger and criticize. He used distinct right and wrong and strong love and
hatred as the main connotation of the concept of being mild and gentle, sincere
and broadminded, which was a big breakthrough in the traditionally held defi-
nition of this concept.
Shen Deqian (沈德潜 1673–1769), a literary figure of the Qing Dynasty, strongly
advocated that poetry education should be characterized by the notion of being
mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded, saying in the “Preface” to his Selected
Qing Poems (《清诗别裁集 · 凡例》that:
)
The reason why poetry is important is no more than the famous sayings Confucius taught his
disciples and son. Poetry is written with the aim of being mild and gentle, sincere and
broadminded, which can be said to be a theory of both the past and present. Since Lu Ji (陆机
261–303) proposed that the characteristic of poetry is to express human thoughts and emo-
tions through beautiful forms, later poets have taken this statement as the criterion of their
poems, and thus, with the passage of time, poetry has become more and more distant from the
aim of being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded. I have selected poems of different
styles, with the criterion that they express the idea of being mild and gentle, sincere and
broadminded (Shen, 2013, p. 1).
By “what Confucius taught the young fellow Boyu,” Shen refers to the chapter
),
“Yanghuo” of The Analects (《论语 · 阳货》 “Why do you young people not study