司空图

Sikong Tu was a Tang-dynasty poet and critic of poetry; public information about his life and official career is limited, and his dates and native place are not recorded in the available sources. His most influential extant work is Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry, which evaluates poetic styles in four-character rhymed phrases, setting out twenty-four modes such as the vigorous, the serene, the ornate, and the composed. Concise in wording and vivid in imagery, it had a profound influence on later poetics and aesthetic criticism and is often regarded as a foundational text of classical Chinese style theory. The collection also includes poems such as Two Poems on Returning to the Mountains from Hexi and On Present Times, Submitted to Minister Lu, showing that his writing embraced both landscape travel and concern for the times. His themes center on poetic evaluation and the feelings of the scholar, expressed in compressed, understated language that uses natural imagery to convey abstract ideas. Sikong Tu is thus closely associated with classical poetry and the tradition of shihua, or poetry criticism, and is indispensable to the study of Chinese poetics.