Abstract：In the Draft Manuscript of Shitian Gao dating back to the Chenghua Era (1465-1487) of the Ming Dynasty, Shen Zhou left a plethora of marks signifying his own revisions. Some of the poems therein underwent as many as three or four rounds of modification, vividly presenting a dynamic and evolving process of alteration. However, these revisions were not the outcome of painstaking and deliberate contemplation by the author. Instead, they were spontaneous, with alterations being made on the spur of the moment as ideas emerged, and amendments occurring at any given time. Even after the publication of the Draft Manuscript of Shitian Gao, the act of rewriting did not come to a halt. The Hongzhi block-printed edition of the Ming Dynasty contained further deletions and modifications in comparison with the Draft Manuscript, and the Zhengde block-printed edition of Shitian Shixuan still bore textual discrepancies when contrasted with the Hongzhi edition. All these were the result of Shen Zhou’s continuous and repeated refinement efforts. By comparing the Draft Manuscript, the Hongzhi edition, and the Zhengde edition, one can discern the traces of three distinct stages of revision within these three collections. Moreover, the Draft Manuscript does not represent the pristine original draft of the poems. There existed an even earlier iteration of the poetry collection, wherein Shen Zhou had already made certain adjustments prior to the act of transcription. The content of the revised drafts is of a superior quality compared with the originals. Some scholars, in an attempt to highlight the value of the Draft Manuscript, deliberately emphasize the precision of its textual variants and the literary merits of the initial drafts. In actuality, they fail to fully appreciate Shen Zhou’s fluid and dynamic process of poetic revision.Shen Zhou was the progenitor of the Wu School of Painting. Among the extant authentic paintings and the artworks documented in historical records, a significant number contain the artist’s inscribed poems on paintings. When we incorporate calligraphy and painting into the comparison and verification of the aforementioned three poetry collections, the process of Shen Zhou’s poetic revision becomes even more intricate and complex. When the calligraphy and paintings were created antecedently and the poetry collections were compiled subsequently, they were either directly incorporated into the Draft Manuscript or were founded on earlier revisions. However, when previous works were transcribed onto new paintings, the author often relied on memory, which gave rise to the confounding of original drafts and revised versions, thereby resulting in a multiplicity of textual variants. The author has identified three scenarios, which will be expounded upon separately. Although there exist numerous forgeries of Shen Zhou’s paintings, if they are replicas of authentic works, they pose minimal hindrance to the study of the textual variants in Shen Zhou’s poetry. The probability of forgers deliberately fabricating a large number of variant texts in his poetry is even more remote. In cases where the painting scrolls have been lost or no longer exist, the process of revision can still be investigated through the records documented in poetry collections or art inventories. By employing calligraphy and painting materials to illustrate Shen Zhou’s process of poetic revision, the comparison of textual variants can also be conducive to the authentication of his paintings. Expanding the sample materials and extrapolating certain patterns from the perspective of textual variants could substantially contribute to the scrutiny of the authenticity of Shen Zhou’s paintings.The textual variants in Shen Zhou’s poems are the results of the author’s meticulous and painstaking efforts, as well as his scrupulous consideration of each word and sentence. The modalities by which he revised his poems can be categorized into three types: the refinement of words, the refinement of sentences, and the refinement of meaning. In the context of word refinement, it involved either transforming common words into uncommon ones to eschew banality or substituting uncommon words with common ones to dispel ambiguity. The refinement of sentences primarily encompasses two aspects: the substitution of allusions and the adjustment of sentence structures. The refinement of meaning is chiefly manifested as the enrichment of content and the transformation of the theme. The effects of Shen Zhou’s poetic refinement can also be encapsulated as rectifying errors, elevating the commonplace to the refined, converting a plain and straightforward narration into a rhythmic and undulating one, and even augmenting the content or altering the central idea, rendering it superior to the initial draft. Nevertheless, there are also some instances of over-refinement. The copious resources of textual variants in the literature of the Ming and Qing Dynasties can reconstruct the dynamic process of poets’ revisions, probe into their creative mentalities, and examine the evolution of poetics, potentially emerging as a promising academic focal point.
2025, Vol. 55 
