1. INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL MILIEU
1.1 Confucianism
1.1.1 Confucian morality preached in Sima Xiangru’s “Fu on the Imperial Park”
1.1.2 The Confucian cosmic vision in Du Fu’s poetry
1.1.3 Chen Zi’ang’s blending of Confucian ethics with Daoist and Buddhist spirituality
1.1.4 Bai Juyi’s promotion of the restoration of Confucian values through poetry
1.1.5 Ridicule of Confucian honors and titles in Qiao Ji’s “Of Myself”
1.2 Daoism and Abstruse Learning (Xuanxue)
1.2.1 Laozi’s utopian vision in Tao Qian’s farmstead poems
1.2.2 Zhuangzi’s ideas on language and meaning in Tao Qian’s poems
1.2.3 Yijing hexagrams as the structural model of Xie Lingyun’s landscape poems
1.2.4 Yin-yang cosmology and the tonal patterns of regulated verse
1.2.5 Yin-yang cosmology in Wang Zhihuan’s “Climbing Crane Tower”
1.2.6 Alchemy as content and model in Li Bai’s “A Lu Mountain Tune: Sent to Minister Lu Xuzhou”
1.2.7 Gender and reclusion
1.2.8 Reclusion and transcendental roaming (see 2.9)
1.3 Buddhism
1.3.1 Buddhist perspectives in Xiao Gang’s poems on things
1.3.2 Landscape and Buddhist vision in Wang Wei’s “Zhongnan Mountain”
1.3.3 Buddhist concepts and vision in Wang Wei’s quatrains
1.3.4 Buddhism and poetry discussed in Su Shi’s “Seeing Off Canliao”
1.3.5 Buddhist elements in women’s poetry
1.4 Music and Ritual Performances
1.4.1 Folk and court music in the Shijing
1.4.2 Shamanistic performances in the Chuci
1.4.3 The establishment of the Music Bureau in the Han
1.4.4 Music performance and irregular line lengths in Han yuefu poetry
1.4.5 Types of songs and music related to Han yuefu poetry
1.4.6 Yuefu songs performed at the Liang court
1.4.7 Poems on music by Li He and their influence on Li Shangyin
1.4.8 Six Dynasties yuefu quatrain songs
1.4.9 Heptasyllabic quatrains as Tang dynasty song lyrics
1.4.10 New music from Central Asia and the rise of ci poetry
1.4.11 Musical tunes as part of a ci poem’s title
1.4.12 Musical songs and Yuan drama conventions
1.4.13 Musical modes and tunes as part of a qu poem’s title
1.4.14 Marriage rituals recorded in Gan Lirou’s “Hastening the Bride’s Toilet”
2. THEMES
2.1 Love and Courtship
2.1.1 Historical contexts for love songs
2.1.2 Erotic love in the Shijing
2.1.3 A lover compared to love’s tokens
2.1.4 Courtship and shamanistic rituals in the Chuci
2.1.5 In shamanistic rituals described in the Chuci
2.1.6 As analogous to the ruler–minister relationship in the Chuci
2.1.7 As analogous to the quest for one’s ideals
2.1.8 Flirtation and repartee in the Han yuefu poem “Mulberry Along the Lane”
2.1.9 Yearning for the absent beloved
2.1.10 Reunion with the beloved after a temporary separation
2.1.11 The special use of conventions of romance in Li Shangyin’s poetry
2.1.12 A lover’s quarrel in a Ziye song of the Six Dynasties
2.1.13 Romantic imaginings in Du Mu’s “Red Cliff”
2.1.14 Morning-after ennui in Wen Tingyun’s “To the Tune ‘Buddha-Like arbarian’”
2.1.15 A bedside admission to playing coy in Guan Hanqing’s “On Love”
2.1.16 A girl’s bold confession of love in Guan Yunshi’s “On Separation”
2.1.17 A girl’s exhortation to carnal pleasure in Bai Pu’s “On Love”
2.1.18 An erotic parody of poems on things in Wang Heqing’s “On the Big Butterfly”
2.1.19 Sisterly love in Gan Lirou’s poems
2.1.20 Conjugal love in linked verse
2.1.21 Yearning for the absent beloved in Cai Shen’s “To the Tune ‘Sixteen-Character Song’”
2.2 The Beautiful Woman
2.2.1 Compared to flora
2.2.2 As a symbol of moral virtues in Qu Yuan’s “On Encountering Trouble”
2.2.3 The combination of sensual beauty and moral rectitude in a Han yuefu poem
2.2.4 The illusion of beauty in Xiao Gang’s “On a Fair Lady Viewing a Painting”
2.2.5 Sensual beauty and the voyeur’s gaze in Wen Tingyun’s “To the Tune ‘On the Water Clock at Night’”
2.2.6 Delightful images of
2.3 The Abandoned Woman
2.3.1 Plaints of an abandoned female lover
2.3.2 Her lover compared to a wandering river
2.3.3 An outburst of anger by a Han yuefu persona
2.3.4 The representation of a lonely woman in Xie Tiao’s “Jade Stairs Resentment”
2.3.5 Boudoir lament as a mode evoked in the romantic poetry of Li Shangyin
2.3.6 The soldier’s lonely wife in Jin Changxu’s “Spring Lament”
2.3.7 The abandoned palace lady Ban Jieyu in Li Bai’s “Lament of the Jade Stairs”
2.3.8 The abandoned palace lady Ban Jieyu in Wang Changling’s jueju “Autumn Songs of the Hall of Abiding Faith”
2.3.9 A wandering man and an abandoned woman accusing each other in the anonymous “To the Tune ‘Southern Tune’”
2.3.10 Appropriation of the abandoned woman’s voice by early ci poets
2.3.11 Nature and the emotions of abandonment in Ouyang Xiu’s [attrib.] “To the Tune ‘Butterflies Lingering over Flowers’”
2.3.12 The interplay of imagined and realistic scenes in Ouyang Xiu’s [attrib.] “To the Tune ‘Butterflies Lingering over Flowers’”
2.3.13 An outpouring of sorrow depicted in Li Qingzhao’s “To the Tune ‘One Beat Followed by Another, a Long Tune’”
2.3.14 Springtime melancholia blended with historical reflections in Xin Qiji’s “To the Tune ‘Groping for Fish’”
2.3.15 Self-representation of a young widow
2.4 Eulogy and Admonition
2.4.1 A young woman’s warning to her lover not to come too close
2.4.2 Praise of King Wen’s exploits
2.4.3 Qu Yuan’s admonition to King Huai
2.4.4 An epideictic depiction of an imperial park by Sima Xiangru
2.4.5 Admonition to Emperor Wu of the Han in a fu poem by Sima Xiangru
2.4.6 A hymn to the Grand Unity in the Han yuefu corpus
2.4.7 The evocation of Shanglin Park in Du Fu’s “Autumn Meditations”
2.5 Hardship and Injustice
2.5.1 A return from traveling but to a different woman
2.5.2 Protest against social injustice in Qu Yuan’s “On Encountering Trouble”
2.5.3 Hardship caused by one’s uprightness in an unjust world
2.5.4 Poems of social protest in the Han yuefu corpus
2.5.5 Social protest in Du Fu’s “Three Quatrains”
2.5.6 Social critique in Chen Zi’ang’s “Ganyu”
2.5.7 Social critique in Bai Juyi’s poems
2.5.8 Poetic witness to hardship and injustice
2.5.9 The parodic style in Li Yu’s “Recording Disorder”
2.5.10 Wang Duanshu’s narrative of her plight during the Manchu conquest
2.5.11 Gan Lirou’s narration of widowhood
2.5.12 Wen Tianxiang’s lamentation over the ruined country
2.6 The Wandering Man
2.6.1 Brooding over separation and aging in the “Nineteen Old Poems”
2.6.2 Human transience and carpe diem in the “Nineteen Old Poems”
2.6.3 The poet in exile in Du Fu’s “Autumn Meditations”
2.6.4 Meeting a neighbor on the road in Wang Wei’s “Miscellaneous Poems”
2.6.5 The homesick soldier in Wang Changling’s “Following the Army”
2.6.6 Reflections on solitude
2.6.7 A wandering man and an abandoned woman accusing each other in the anonymous “To the Tune ‘Southern Tune’”
2.6.8 The monologue of a homesick wanderer in Liu Yong’s “To the Tune ‘Eight Beats of a Ganzhou Song’”
2.6.9 Moments of intense perception and reflection in Ma Zhiyuan’s “Autumn Thoughts”
2.6.10 A personal account of travel in Yuan Mei’s “Traveling in the Mountains: Miscellaneous Poem”
2.7 Landscape
2.7.1 A Yijing-based structure in Xie Lingyun’s landscape poems
2.7.2 Verisimilitude and other features of Xie Lingyun’s landscape poems
2.7.3 Landscape details in the poetry of Xie Tiao and Xiao Gang
2.7.4 Mountains and rivers in Wang Zhihuan’s “Climbing Crane Tower”
2.7.5 Landscape as enlightenment in Wang Wei’s jueju poems
2.7.6 Landscape as an analogue of emotion in Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts”
2.7.7 “Climbing high” and viewing the landscape
2.7.8 Landscape and the celestial voyage in Li Bai’s “A Lu Mountain Tune”
2.7.9 Nature and social critique in Bai Juyi’s poems
2.7.10 The fusion of feeling and scene in early ci poetry
2.7.11 Imagery of the frontier in Li Mengyang’s “Autumn Gaze”
2.7.12 Nature in everyday life
2.7.13 Yan Liu’s imitation of Wang Wei’s nature poetry
2.8 Farming and Reclusion
2.8.1 Tao Qian’s personal accounts of rural life
2.8.2 Xie Lingyun’s meditations on withdrawal and service
2.8.3 Farmstead poems by Song poets
2.8.4 Joys of a fisherman and a woodcutter in Qiao Ji’s “Idle Chats of the Woodcutter and the Fisherman”
2.8.5 A recluse’s witty ridicule of Confucian honors and titles in Qiao Ji’s “Of Myself”
2.9 Imagined Journey to the Celestial World
2.9.1 In shamanistic rituals
2.9.2 Shamanistic flight of the daimon
2.9.3 The world of the Daoist immortals in Han yuefu
2.9.4 The celestial journey in Late Tang poetry
2.9.5 Motifs of immortals in Late Tang poetry
2.9.6 Longing for the goddess of the moon in Li Shangyin’s “Chang’e”
2.9.7 Blended with landscape depiction in Li Bai’s poetry
2.9.8 Reflections on Daoist transcendence
2.9.9 Su Shi speaking in the voice of an immortal
2.10 The Depiction of Things
2.10.1 In shamanistic flight
2.10.2 Seeing things from a Buddhist perspective in Xiao Gang’s poems
2.10.3 Poems on objects as a possible mode in Li Shangyin’s hermetic poems
2.10.4 Song lyrics on objects (yongwu ci)
2.10.5 Plum blossoms depicted in Lin Bu’s “Small Plum Tree in a Garden in the Hills, No. I”
2.10.6 An erotic parody of “poems on things” in Wang Heqing’s “On the Big Butterfly”
2.10.7 A child’s poem about the moon
2.11 Remembrances
2.11.1 The capital city Jiankang in Yu Xin’s “In Response to Director Liu Zhen”
2.11.2 Memory of the Tang and Han in Du Fu’s “Autumn Meditations”
2.11.3 Historical fantasy in Late Tang poetry and narrative
2.11.4 Remembering the Three Kingdoms in Du Mu’s “Red Cliff”
2.11.5 Memory as regret in Du Mu’s “Dispelling Sorrow”
2.11.6 Nostalgia for the poetry of the ancients
2.11.7 Lost empire in Li Yu’s “To the Tune ‘Beautiful Lady Yu’”
2.11.8 Remembrance of time past in Yan Shu’s “To the Tune ‘Sand in Silk-Washing Stream’”
2.11.9 A great battle and its heroic victor in Su Shi’s “Meditation on the Past at Red Cliff”
2.11.10 Lost love in Wu Wenying’s “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song”
2.11.11 The beloved wife in Mei Yaochen’s “Lament for My Wife”
2.11.12 A lost country in Lu You’s “As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night”
2.11.13 The rise and fall of past dynasties in Zhang Yanghao’s “Meditation on the Past at Tong Pass”
2.11.14 Nostalgia for the fallen Ming capital in Wang Shizhen’s “Miscellaneous Poems”
3. PROSODY
3.1 Rhyme
3.1.1 General features of Chinese poetic rhymes
3.1.2 Rhyming schemes of regulated verse
3.1.3 Rhyming schemes of regulated quatrains
3.1.4 Rhyming patterns and poetic closure in regulated quatrains
3.1.5 Irregular-line rhymes of ci poetry
3.2 Tonal Patterning
3.2.1 Prototypes of tonal patterning in Xie Tiao’s works
3.2.2 Four tonal patterns of regulated quatrains
3.2.3 Four tonal patterns of pentasyllabic regulated verse
3.2.4 Four tonal patterns of heptasyllabic regulated verse
3.2.5 Tonal patterns and poetic closure in regulated quatrains
3.2.6 The avoidance of tonal patterning in Tang ancient-style poems
3.2.7 Tonal patterning in ci poetry
3.2.8 Tonal patterning in qu poetry
3.3 Semantic Rhythm
3.3.1 The primary importance of semantic rhythm in Chinese poetry
3.3.2 Tetrameter as standard in early verse
3.3.3 2 + 3 rhythm of pentasyllabic shi poetry
3.3.4 Semantic rhythm in jueju verse
3.3.5 Variations in semantic rhythm in old-style poetry
3.3.6 2 + 2 rhythm of tetrasyllabic shi poetry
3.3.7 3 + 2 rhythm of sao poetry
3.3.8 Typical rhythms of fu poetry
3.3.9 2 + 2 + 3 rhythm of heptasyllabic shi poetry
3.3.10 4 + 3 rhythm of heptasyllabic shi poetry
3.3.11 Variable rhythms of ci and qu poetry
4. DICTION
4.1. Alliterative and Rhyming Binomes
4.1.1 As emotional expressions in the Shijing
4.1.2 As a means of enlivening description in Han fu poetry
4.1.3 As a means of combining emotion and perception
4.1.4 Used to intensify emotional expression in Li Qingzhao’s “To the Tune ‘One Beat Followed by Another, a Long Tune’”
4.1.5 Used to enhance perceptual and emotive impact in Qiao Ji’s “Of This Occasion”
4.2 Structuring and Animating Words
4.2.1 Xing as a structural foundation for a poem
4.2.2 Structural functions of the refrain word xi
4.2.3 “Verse eyes” in the “Nineteen Old Poems”
4.2.4 “Verse eyes” in Six Dynasties poetry
4.2.5 The avoidance of “empty words” in regulated verse
4.2.6 The abundance of “content words” in regulated verse
4.2.7 Puns in Six Dynasties yuefu quatrains
4.2.8 The avoidance of “empty words” in some late Six Dynasties quatrains
4.2.9 The use of “empty words” in short ci poetry
4.2.10 Structural functions of “leading words” in Liu Yong’s “To the Tune ‘Eight Beats of a Ganzhou Song’”
4.3 Allusion
4.3.1 Literary echoes in Yu Xin’s “In Response to Director Liu Zhen”
4.3.2 Compression and fragmentation of image in Late Tang poetry
4.3.3 Du Fu’s allusions to his own works in “Autumn Meditations”
4.3.4 Allusion and ambiguity in Late Tang regulated verse
4.3.5 Fantastic tales and apocryphal history in Late Tang poetry
4.3.6 Chuci romances alluded to in Late Tang poetry
4.3.7 In the lady Ban Jieyu story in Tang jueju verse
4.3.8 For expressing romantic sensibility in Du Mu’s “Red Cliff”
4.3.9 In Li Bai’s poems
4.3.10 In Bai Juyi’s poems
4.3.11 Allusion and spatial design
4.3.12 Textual allusion for political allegory
4.3.13 Wu Wenying’s allusions to his own works
4.3.14 Allusions merged with description in Wang Anshi’s “Written on Master Huyin’s Wall”
4.3.15 In Li Mengyang’s “Autumn Gaze”
5. SYNTAX
5.1 Parallel Couplet
5.1.1 An example by Xie Lingyun
5.1.2 Increasingly intricate parallelism in late Six Dynasties poetry
5.1.3 “Borrowed parallelism”
5.1.4 The dense style in the poetry of Du Fu and Late Tang poets
5.1.5 Descriptive parallelism in jueju verse
5.1.6 Avoided in second couplets of jueju verse
5.1.7 Avoided in Tang ancient-style poems
5.1.8 In ancient-style poetry
5.1.9 Avoided in early ci poetry
5.1.10 Syntactic and semantic parallelism in Yuan Hongdao’s “Composed at Random”
5.2 Subject + Predicate Construction
5.2.1 As a spatiotemporal-logical principle of organization
5.2.2 In Chinese compared with English
5.2.3 Fenollosa’s and Pound’s praise of Chinese subject + predicate construction
5.2.4 Pseudo–subject + predicate construction in some shi poems
5.2.5 Multiline subject + predicate construction in some ci poems
5.3 Topic + Comment Construction
5.3.1 As an analogical-associational principle of organization
5.3.2 Comparison of topic + comment constructions in pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic jueju verse
5.3.3 Compared with subject + predicate construction
5.3.4 Originative topic + comment construction in the Shijing
5.3.5 Weakened topic + comment construction in sao poetry
5.3.6 Variants of topic + comment construction in shi poetry
5.3.7 Multiline topic + comment construction in some ci and qu poems
5.3.8 Skewed topic + comment construction in some ci and qu poems
6. STRUCTURE
6.1 Spatiotemporal-Logical Structures
6.1.1 Fu as a spatiotemporal-logical principle of global structuring
6.1.2 Blended with analogical-associational structures
6.1.3 Subject + predicate construction
6.1.4 The lyric use of the fu principle in ci poetry
6.1.5 The tripartite linear structure of Han fu poetry
6.1.6 The transformation of the self-expressive mode
6.1.7 The creation of spatial design in long ci poetry
6.1.8 Narrating life phases
6.2 Analogical-Associational Structures
6.2.1 Blended with spatiotemporal-logical structures
6.2.2 Balanced bipartite combination of nature and emotion in shi poetry
6.2.3 Definition of fu, bi, xing
6.2.4 Bi-xing as an analogical-associational principle of local structuring
6.2.5 Bi-xing as a global binary structure in the “Nineteen Old Poems”
6.2.6 A binary nature–emotion division within the fourfold thematic development in regulated verse
6.2.7 Topic + comment construction
6.2.8 Imbalanced combination of nature and emotion in ci and qu poetry
6.3 Other Structures
6.3.1 Incremental repetition as a structural device
6.3.2 Composite structure in the Han yuefu poem “Mulberry Along the Lane”
6.3.3 Music-based structural components in Han yuefu poetry
6.3.4 A Yijing-based structure in Xie Lingyun’s landscape poems
6.3.5 A yin-yang alternation of nonparallel and parallel couplets in regulated verse
6.3.6 Oral linguistic structure in jueju verse
6.3.7 Heptasyllabic quatrain series
6.3.8 Jueju structure for poetic closure