Chapter 9: Prosaic Writing, Linguistic Errors, and Language Impediments

Section 1: Objective Criteria for Prosaic Writing

One often hears amateur poetry critics use impressionistic evaluative remarks such as: “Your poem is very prosaic!” or “That passage in your poem is very prosaic!” If the author then asks, “What kind of prosaicness?”, the critic is often unable to provide an answer, because their standard of judgment is likely based on “feeling”—that is, subjective impressionistic speculation. Such impression-based evaluations are difficult to convince the author of their validity.

To accuse a literary work of being prosaic, one must have solid reasoning and theoretical support to substantiate one’s claim. The author believes that whether a line or passage is “prosaic” must be judged according to objective criteria:

(1) At the semantic level, prosaic writing refers to “language that is simple, direct, and not resistant to chewing or savoring.”

(2) At the level of expressive technique, prosaic writing refers to “the absence of, or only the use of low-level expressive techniques: simile, description, enargeia (vivid presentation), and contrast, etc.”

Only when both conditions are present can one conclude that a poem or a passage within a poem is “prosaic.” Of course, the density of poetic quality will affect the level of artistic strength. In fact, it is unlikely that a poem would contain absolutely no such thinly poetic prosaic sentences. Prosaic sentences often serve a harmonizing function. Especially when a poem has a relatively high density of poetic language, prosaic syntax functions like brake pads, preventing the semantic flow of the poem from sliding into a murky jungle of obscurity.

Broken Dream Blade / Chen Feifei (Chen Qufei)

Rumor in the martial world has long said:
Breaking the soul is easy, breaking the heart is difficult;
breaking the heart is difficult, breaking dreams is even harder.

—poet Zhang Cuo, same theme

I have drunk countless neck-bloods; a blade
wraps its own murderous aura into sleep.

And you, swordsman,
your sleep-talking is as colorful as snowflakes,
dancing among the disheveled hair of reeds by the riverbank.

A flesh-colored night—I returned from the brothel after buying wine,
just having removed my jet-black tight outfit.
From afar came several crow cries:
“Could it be that tonight someone comes again for revenge?”

You suddenly turned over and sat up, grabbing your long blade.
In the moonlight, you stroked your beard and drank wine.
Your sharp silhouette was like a blade of cold steel itself.

I recall that year, the Black Wood Cliff battle:
you challenged the Seven Masters of Wudang alone, sword moving through the Seven Stars formation.
A long blade enclosed within a sword array, in a moment of razor-thin margins,
yet still able to move freely, like clouds following the dragon.

Like a close-to-people quatrain, carrying perilous rhymes,
from the sonorous rhythm of the flourishing Tang, rising from the crest of the waves.
A thunderclap that made all heroes and warriors in the hall hold their breath in shock.

In the end, I am only a humble scholar,
failed in the civil examinations, drifting helplessly in the martial world.
Several volumes of songs and poems are often used by courtesans as side dishes for wine.

Grateful that you did not abandon me, we shared hearts.
You said: a blade can only be used to kill people;
better to use songs and poems to entertain oneself and others.

A blade can sever dreams, but songs and poems can end sorrowful hearts.

Thus I came to believe that life would not consist only of meter and parallelism,
not only of one emotional confrontation after another.

Does this martial arts-style poem contain prosaic syntax? Of course it does.

In the first section, the short transitional phrase “And you, swordsman” is a prosaic sentence. Such transitional phrases are mostly prose-like in nature.

In the second section, “I recall that year, the Black Wood Cliff battle / you challenged the Seven Masters of Wudang alone,” although these lines employ retrospective enargeia, their meaning remains quite direct and straightforward; they are still prosaic syntax.

In the third section, “A flesh-colored night, I returned from the brothel after buying wine / just having removed my jet-black tight outfit / from afar came several crow cries / ‘Could it be that tonight someone comes again for revenge?’ / you suddenly turned over and sat up, grabbing your long blade / in the moonlight, you stroked your beard and drank wine,” the entire passage is primarily narrative, and almost all of its language is prosaic.

In the fourth section, “In the end, I am only a humble scholar / failed in the civil examinations, drifting in the martial world,” and “You said: a blade can only be used to kill people / better to use songs and poems to entertain oneself and others,” the former uses description (humble scholar), and the latter uses contrast (A is better than B). However, in terms of semantic depth, there is no implied meaning; these are also prosaic syntactic constructions.

Section 2: Linguistic Errors and Language Impediments

If a poetry critic truly does not understand the semantic meaning of a sentence, they should not casually use “prosaic writing” as a blanket dismissal. If the error lies in grammatical structure, the critic must identify it as a “linguistic error.” If the meaning is genuinely difficult to understand, then it is a “language impediment,” meaning that even after exhausting various expressive rhetorical devices (such as symbolism, synesthesia, surrealism, etc.), one still cannot clearly reconstruct the intended meaning of the sentence.

Let us examine the following three sets of poetic examples:

a.
Using a pool of water to imprison a single moon
Harvesting a ground of moonlight
Feeding an entire house of loneliness

b.
I catch bugs
Flowers hidden in a mass of flowers, erroneous forms
Characters hidden in a pile of characters, invisibility

c.
Streetlights, warriors guarding the night
Pushing down one exhausted body after another
Shadows crawl homeward, the fading skin of warmth

Please consider them carefully, then fill in the answer space below with the option code you believe is correct:

(1) No problem
(2) Has linguistic error
(3) Has language impediment

My reference answers are: (1) a, (2) c, (3) b

Explanation of a:
“Feeding an entire house of loneliness”—“a house” is a quantifier; what follows should originally be a noun as the object. Here, “loneliness” is an adjective that has been nominalized through functional shift (part-of-speech conversion). Since “loneliness” and “house” can be naturally connected semantically, there is no grammatical problem.

Explanation of b:
“Flowers hidden in a mass of flowers, erroneous forms / Characters hidden in a pile of characters, invisibility.”
“Erroneous forms hidden in a mass of flowers” metaphorically uses printed type as “flowers,” which is marginally semantically understandable. However, in “characters hidden in a pile of characters, invisibility,” the words “hidden” and “invisible” overlap in meaning and are highly redundant. Placing them in the same sentence creates semantic redundancy. It would be better to revise it as “characters hidden in a maze of characters,” or “characters invisibly hidden in a maze of characters.”

Explanation of c:
“Pushing down one exhausted body after another”—this also involves adjectival nominalization. However, “exhausted” does not logically connect with the quantifier phrase “one after another.” Instead, the meaning must jump to the next line, “shadows,” and thus cannot logically continue within the same semantic chain. If revised to “pushing down one exhausted face after another,” using “face” as a metonym for “warrior,” then the sentence would no longer produce grammatical or semantic error.

Writing modern poetry criticism is not merely about interpreting sentence meaning or poetic imagery. It must also include investigation and evaluation of expressive techniques; otherwise it can only be called “reading guidance,” because there is neither analysis nor qualitative judgment.

Whether interpreting poetic meaning or analyzing expressive technique, both must appropriately cite theoretical foundations (rhetoric, grammar, semantics) to support the critic’s arguments. One must not rely entirely on subjective inference or assumption, because that easily leads to misreading or over-reading of poetic texts, falling into semantic error zones.

Such interpretation or reasoning based purely on personal conviction is what the author defines as “impressionistic criticism.”