SOURCE: A foreword to The Prose-Poetry of Su Tung-P'o, translated by Cyril Drummond Le Gros Clark, 1935. Reprint by Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1964, xiii-xxii.

Ch'ien Chung-shu is one of China's most distinguished literary figures. A professor of English and Chinese at Kwang Hua University in Shanghai, he is the author of numerous essays, a significant body of literary criticism, and several short stories. He is probably best known for his novel Wei Cheng (1947; Fortress Besieged, 1979), a satire regarded as one of the greatest Chinese literary works of the twentieth century. Below, he comments on Su's prose poems and adds that "the interest of Su Tung-p'o for us lies in the fact that he does not share the spirit of his age."

Of the Sung dynasty, it may be said, as Hazlitt said of himself in the words of Iago, that it is nothing if not critical. The Chinese people...