6 i n t roDuC t ion
rhythms to fit musical tunes. It is from this deep, wholehearted engagement with
oral folk tradition that the five major genres of Chinese poetry were born.
As a rule, the development of a Chinese poetic genre consisted of a long pro-
cess of imitating, assimilating, and eventually transforming an oral tradition into
a purely literary one by the literati. This steady movement from orality to literacy
was marked by the gradual disappearance of oral performance, the allegorical ap-
propriation of folk themes, the abandonment of simple language for elegant dic-
tion, and the excessive use of allusion. If we trace the development from Han yuefu
(chap. 4) to Late Tang regulated verse (chap. 9), or from the early short ci (chap. 12)
to the late long ci poems on objects (chap. 15), we can perceive a clear intra-generic
trajectory from orality to literacy. Interestingly, an obsessive pursuit of textuality
(diction) and intertextuality (allusions) often marks the last great glory of a thor-
oughly “literatified” (wenren hua) genre and heralds the rapid ascendancy of a new
genre of oral folk origin. The blossoming of ci poetry in the Song and qu poetry in
the Yuan epitomizes such an inter-generic shift from literacy to orality.
We may conceive of orality and literacy as opposing yet complementary poles of
Chinese poetic creativity. The sustained interaction between the two acted like a
yin-yang dynamic. While orality is a fount of creative energy to be tapped again and
again, literacy is what brings the rich potential of orality to its fullest realization.
The waxing and waning of orality and literacy is not a nonprogressive cycle but a
dynamic forward movement. Given the pivotal importance of orality in renewing
Chinese poetic traditions, it is not surprising that some advocates of a radical cul-
tural revolution in the early twentieth century turned to oral traditions—from the
airs of the Book of Poetry to the living oral traditions of Chinese ethnic minorities—
to find inspiration for their poetical revolution.P r o s oD y
Listening to the sound recording of selected poems, we shall take note of a few
prominent features of Chinese prosody. First of all, Chinese rhyme is simpler than
English rhyme. Whereas English rhyme requires a matching of vowels and suc-
ceeding consonants of accented syllables (for example, “pan” and “can”), Chinese
rhyme often involves the matching of vowels only. There are far fewer ending con-
sonants in Chinese than in English: n and ng in Chinese of all periods and unaspi-
rated p, t, and k for entering tones in ancient and medieval Chinese. Rhyme in
Chinese does not necessarily require the matching of identical vowels; sometimes
vowels of similar phonetic value suffice.
End rhyme is the most important rhyme in Chinese poetry, as in English
poetry. The rhyming scheme varies considerably from genre to genre. Shi, sao,
and fu poems usually rhyme on even-number lines, and often the same rhyme is
employed for most, if not all, of a poem (probably owing to an abundance of homo-
nyms). In tonally regulated shi poetry, rhyme does not change and is required to be
in level tone. In the ci and qu genres, however, rhyme sometimes changes two or
more times in a poem (C12.7) and occurs with less predictable frequency—some-
times in almost every line (C12.6), other times at extended intervals (C14.3). More-