The Beginning of Literati Poetry: Four Poems from First-century BCE China

This article examines a set of four tetrasyllabic poems from the first century BCE, situating them between the ancient poetry of the Shijing and the medieval poetry that would appear two centuries later. The author outlines the emergence of a learned elite in the latter half of the Western Han and shows how the intellectual and socio-political background of this group is instantiated in the poems. As statements of a classicist mentality ascendant in the late Western Han, the poems stand firmly in their age, but as products of this newly emerging group they bear definite connection to the literati poetry of medieval China. Thus, the poems offer a viewpoint onto both the scholarly culture of the first century BCE and the poetic culture of early medieval China.