Poetry in the Han Dynasty
2 min readThe most notable achievement in poetry was Yuefu poetry，a splendid benchmark in the history of Chinese poetry.Another remarkable achievement is Nineteen Old Poems，a short anthology of 19 five-character poems.It was in this period that four-characterpoetry was replaced by new five-character poetry and seven-character poetry.Famous writers of five-character poetry and seven-character poetry were Ban Gu，Zhang Heng，Qin Jia（the 2nd century），and others.
Yuefu，literally“Music Bureau，”was originally the name of a government institution of the Han Dynasty，created in 120 BC by Emperor Wu of the Western Han for the purpose of collecting folk songs and ballads and writing musical scores for ceremonial occasions at court.
Later，Yuefu was used to refer to the anthology of poems collected by this bureau.
Yuefu poetic songs concern mainly the sufferings of the masses caused by war and corvee，high-handedness of the government，and marital affairs，inheriting the realist traditions of Shi Jing.Famous Yuefu poems include“Song of the East Gate”，“The Roadside Mulberry”，“The Old Soldier’s Return”，and“A Pair of Peacocks Southeast Fly”.The last one is the most outstanding，telling of the tragedy of ayoung married couple who committed suicide as the result of the cruelty of the husband’s mother.Yuefu poems are characterized by vivid plot，lively characters and plain but flexible use of language.They are usually regular five-character lines with few of them uneven.Yuefu poetrywas very influential in breaking ground for later classic poetry，with its broader use of rhyme and fewer metrical restrictions.Many later writers，including Li Bai and Bai Juyi，continued to create poems derived from the Yuefu tradition.
The Nineteen Old Poems was selected and compiled by Xiao Tong（501-531），the prince of King Wu of the Liang Dynasty in the Southern Dynasties.Poems in this anthology aregenerally believed to be created by anonymous Han poets.It manifests the highest achievement in the composition of five-character poetry，and thus was entitled“The Crown of Five-character Poetry”.These poems express either the homesickness for their wives and hometowns of some ambitious scholars who traveled far away from home and struggled hard，or the lonely life of their wives who missed their husbands deeply.
