Chuci
楚辭 (Chuci, 'Songs of Chu')
A loyal minister unjustly exiled by a ruler he cannot stop loving may still find, through shamanic flight, cosmic wandering, and lament, a language for grief and integrity that the plain, communal voice of the Shijing has no room for.
- Qu Yuan's exile and suicide as founding poetic myth
- shamanic and cosmic imagery distinct from the Shijing
- first sustained first-person lyric voice in Chinese poetry
- compiled as an anthology by Liu Xiang
An anthology centered on the poems attributed to Qu Yuan, a Chu court minister exiled on false charges who, tradition holds, drowned himself in the Miluo River in protest, an act still commemorated at the Dragon Boat Festival. Its poems, especially the long autobiographical 'Li Sao' (Encountering Sorrow), draw on southern Chu shamanic imagery, exotic plants, and cosmic flight in a lush, first-person, emotionally extravagant style sharply different from the restrained, often communal voice of the northern Shijing tradition, establishing the alternative pole around which later Chinese poetry oscillates. It was compiled as an anthology, with later poets' imitations added, by the Han bibliographer Liu Xiang and annotated by Wang Yi in the 2nd century AD.
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