Cold Mountain Poems by Hanshan
Published 800 · 12,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature, Religion
How hard is Cold Mountain Poems to read?
Cold Mountain Poems scores 60 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: 52 out of 100
- Deliberately colloquial Tang vernacular with Buddhist and Daoist terms, avoiding the literary diction of court poetry.
- Sentence structure: 44 out of 100
- Plain five-character lines in loose old-style verse, closer to speech than to regulated forms.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- Buddhist argument about mind, impermanence and attachment, sometimes stated outright and sometimes hidden inside a description of a road.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Short, repetitive poems with a limited stock of images and few allusions the reader must chase.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- The speaker is a persona of uncertain identity assembled by several hands, and the poems address a reader they assume will fail to understand.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Cold Mountain is simultaneously a mountain, a state of mind and the poet, and the collection never separates the three.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- He mocks monks, officials, the rich and his own readers, and several poems are written to insult whoever is holding the book.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Poems end on a question or a shut door, and the identity of the poet is left permanently unsettled.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- An unordered collection by probably several authors across two centuries, with no arrangement carrying meaning.
How Cold Mountain Poems is regarded
Cold Mountain Poems holds a literary regard score of 69 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.