The Tang dynasty, one of China’s greatest dynasties, is seen by many as the golden
age of Chinese poetry. It saw an unprecedented rise of poetry’s status. Poetry was
made an essential part of the civil service examinations and became something
of a national pursuit. The number of Tang poems composed and collected was
staggering. The Quan Tang shi (Complete Shi Poetry of the Tang), compiled in 1705,
contains nearly 49,000 poems by 2,200 poets.
Shi poetry reached its apex of development, marked by two important formal
innovations, during the Tang. One was the rise of heptasyllabic poetry (chaps. 9
and 10), a form only sporadically used before the Tang, to compete with the long-
dominant pentasyllabic poetry (chaps. 5–7). The other was the establishment of
recent-style poetry (jinti shi), a heavily regulated type of shi poetry. The term “re-
cent style” was invented to indicate a mandatory implementation of syntactic,
structural, and tonal regulations in this new shi type, while the older term “ancient
style” (guti) was broadened to designate all unregulated shi poetry. From the Tang
onward, these two distinctive types constituted the main categories of shi poetry.
Recent-style poetry consists of two main subcategories of its own: lüshi (regu-
lated verse) and regulated jueju (quatrains). Lüshi has a fixed length of eight lines,
but its variant, pailü (extended regulated verse), is longer, ranging from ten all
the way up to about three hundred lines. Jueju poems are invariably four lines.
Both lüshi and jueju are further divided by line length into two: pentasyllabic and
heptasyllabic.
Lüshi is undoubtedly one of the most complicated kinds of poetry in the world.
In writing a lüshi poem, a poet must strictly follow complex, interlocked sets of
rules for word choice, syntax, structure, and tonal patterning. Using a famous
poem by Du Fu (712–770) as an example, I shall explain these sets of rules to lay
the groundwork for an in-depth study of pentasyllabic lüshi in this chapter and
heptasyllabic lüshi in the next. A good understanding of these rules is also impor-
tant for the study of both pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic quatrains in chapter 10.
The introduction of mandatory sets of rules radically changed the dynamic of
poetry writing. The challenge faced by a lüshi poet was not just to express himself,
but to do so with self-imposed, severe constraints in practically all formal aspects.
Inferior lüshi poets could easily become prisoners of all these formal rules and
turn their works into a trivial language game. But in the hands of great poets,
lüshi could become a most effective means of achieving the time-honored Chi-
nese poetic ideal—to convey what lies beyond language. My close reading of four
❀ 8 ❀
Recent-Style Shi Poetry
Pentasyllabic Regulated Verse (Wuyan Lüshi)