Urban Scenery, Lyrical Lingnan: A Review of Wen Yushe’s Gleaning Scenes and Sights

Abstract

Wen Yushe’s poetry collection Gleaning Scenes and Sights（《物色撷英》） weaves together the natural landscapes, historical sites, human portraits, and reading reflections, which combine to reveal the characteristics of urban and rural Lingnan area, into a spiritual cartography that possesses both classical charm and contemporary resonance. This review takes the poem “Viewing the Horizon” as the entry point for aesthetic analysis, examining how the poet transforms everyday scenery into spiritual imagery, and traces this thread through the collection’s four sections to reveal his creative principle that “scenery is none other than mindscape”. Through close readings of representative works—“Muttering in the Tower” from the travel and nostalgia section, “The Elder Professor” from the human portraiture section, and “Encountering Lu You in Unrolling the Scroll” from the reading reflections section—this review demonstrates how the poet, with his precise yet spirited classical poetic language, channels Zong Baihua’s aesthetics and the classical Chinese poetic tradition, accomplishing a Lingnan poet’s literary-spiritual practice in a contemporary context. The collection is not merely a compilation of personal aesthetic experiences but also a manifesto of aesthetic education through poetry.