author
A pioneering voice in early Chinese literary criticism, this Southern Dynasties scholar is best known for a compact, influential work that ranks poets and reflects on what makes poetry powerful.
Living around 468–518 CE, Zhong Rong was a scholar and critic of the Southern Dynasties period. He is chiefly remembered for Shipin—also known earlier as Shiping—a short but important work of Chinese poetics that evaluates poets and their writing.
His criticism is noted for treating poetry as something that can be closely judged, compared, and discussed on its own terms. Because of that, Shipin is often described as one of the earliest known Chinese works devoted to the systematic evaluation of poets and poetry.
Very little portrait material appears to survive on major reference pages, so a reliable modern author image could not be confirmed.