The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao by Li Qingzhao
Published 1155 · 18,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao to read?
The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao scores 54 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: 60 out of 100
- Ci lyric diction is deliberately plain, but the fixed tune patterns bring their own vocabulary and the reduplicated phrases have no English equivalent.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Ci forms impose irregular line lengths and tonal patterns, and the compression drops connectives so that a phrase can attach forwards or backwards.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Wine cups, geese, flowers, a boat too small to carry her sorrow — the reflection stays fastened to objects.
- Information density: 54 out of 100
- Short poems dense with allusion to earlier lyrics and to the Song collapse, which the reader is expected to supply.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- The occasions are never stated; whether a poem was written before or after 1127 changes its meaning and is often uncertain.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Plum blossom, the returning geese, thin wine and the wutong in rain form a consistent private code for a lost household.
- Ironic distance: 36 out of 100
- Written without irony; the poems mean what they say and their power is in the plainness.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The lyrics stop on an unbearable image with no consolation, and the corpus itself is a fragment of what she wrote.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Short independent lyrics in fixed tune patterns, with the prose afterword appended by editors.
How The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao is regarded
The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao holds a literary regard score of 80 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.