m a jor a s P e C t s oF C H i ne s e P oe t ry 5(chap. 1). During the Han, tetrasyllabic shi poetry experienced a radical decline and
gradually became a niche subgenre of court eulogies and hymns (C4.1–3). This
made room for the meteoric rise of pentasyllabic shi poetry. This new shi subgenre
emerged toward the end of the Han (chaps. 4 and 5) and quickly achieved domi-
nance in the Six Dynasties period (chaps. 6 and 7). By the sixth century, the shi
corpus had become so large that Xiao Tong (501–531), Crown Prince Zhaoming of
Liang, undertook to divide it almost entirely by theme into twenty-four subgenres.
This new thematic scheme, however, did not catch on. The Early Tang witnessed
the rise and explosive growth of tonally regulated shi poetry. It was not long before
regulated shi poetry came to rival its old unregulated brethren in importance, if
not in sheer volume. This gave rise to a broad bipartite division: “ancient-style shi
poetry” (gushi, guti shi) and “recent-style shi poetry” (jinti shi). The former includes
all earlier tonally unregulated shi poetry: pentasyllabic poems, irregular-line yuefu
poems, and others. The latter encompasses two subgenres: regulated verse (lüshi
[chaps. 8, 9, 15, and 17]) and quatrains (jueju [chaps. 10, 15, and 17]). These two new
subgenres are, in turn, divided by per-line syllabic count into pentasyllabic and
heptasyllabic. This complex multilevel scheme of classification was extensively
employed in Ming and Qing anthologies of shi poetry.
The pedigrees of the other four genres are much more straightforward. Strictly
speaking, sao poetry (chap. 2) has no subgenres: most sao poems of later times are
closely modeled after the original Chuci style, marked by extensive use of its signa-
ture pause-indicating word xi.1 The fu genre is often divided by length and subject
matter into the large fu (chap. 3), known for its encyclopedic depiction of Han im-
perial grandeur, and the small fu, known for its shorter length and its lyrical inten-
sity, even though other, more elaborate schemes of division have been devised to
accommodate the rich variety of fu poems composed after the Han. The ci genre is
usually divided by length into short song lyrics (xiaoling [chap. 12]) and long song
lyrics (manic [chaps. 13 and 14]). The qu genre is usually divided and categorized ac-
cording to its association with dramatic conventions of different times and locales.
Yuan song poems (sanqu [chap. 16]) are one of the best known qu subgenres.
o r a l a nD l i t e r a t i t r aD i t i o n sThe evolution of the major poetic genres and subgenres is an intriguing tale of
sustained interaction between the oral folk tradition and the literati tradition, or,
in the parlance of modern literary criticism, between orality and literacy. We can
speak of at least four major oralities: in the shi and sao poetry of pre-Han times, in
Han yuefu poetry, in the ci poetry of the Late Tang and the early Song, and in Yuan
qu poetry. Each of these four oralities is marked by a new genre or subgenre of
oral folk origins having taken center stage in the established literary arena. In each
case, literati poets enthusiastically collected, preserved, and polished folk songs,
often having them performed at the court or in literati gatherings. At the same
time, the literati spared no effort in imitating these songs—both their unadorned
language and their music-based meters—in their own works. Often, they vied with
one another in adapting music-based meters or in refashioning existent semantic