Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Even the shortest list of "China's greatest poets," James R. Hightower wrote in his foreword to Ch'u Tz'u: The Songs of the South, would have to find a place for Qu Yuan (338-278 b.c.). Widely known as the "father of Chinese poetry," he was the first Chinese statesman-intellectual to achieve fame through his poems. These poems represented a sophisticated and technically advanced development that strongly influenced the exuberant and word-manipulating poetry of the centuries that followed.