滄浪詩話
Canglang's Remarks on Poetry
Yan Yu 嚴羽 · 13th century
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Yan Yu compares poetry to Chan Buddhism: it depends on wondrous awakening, not on learning or argument, and the High Tang poets reached it like antelopes hanging by their horns, leaving no trace. The analogy is loose and the book partisan, but it gave Chinese criticism a lasting vocabulary for the ineffable in verse.