Twenty-Four Poetic Moods: Poetry and Personality in Chinese Aesthetics

Abstract

This article identifies certain universal characteristics of creativity and shows how along these general themes the Chinese culture marks its variations. Textual analysis centers on one of the most important texts of literary thought in Chinese poetics, The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry by Ssu-k'ung T'u (837-908). This text is particularly suited for the present purposes because of its dual referentiality to poetry and personality at once. Thematic analysis reveals that the Chinese prototype of creativity consists of most of the essential ingredients of the creative personality as identified in the research literature, such as autonomy and its related traits, the nonconformist dimension of openness to experience, and intrinsic motivation. It also shows how Chinese poetics is unique in its high degree of self-reflexivity and its extensive use of the dialectical principles of complementarity. Furthermore, it shows how the Chinese personality profile of creativity contains the basic traits of psychoticism as identified by Eysenck (1993, 1995) and others, but with important cultural variations.

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