Fu (poetry)

Fu (Chinese: 賦^ⓘ), often translated "rhapsody" or "poetic exposition", is a form of Chinese rhymed prose that was the dominant literary form in China during the Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 220). Fu are intermediary pieces between poetry and prose in which a place, object, feeling, or other subject is described and rhapsodized in exhaustive detail and from as many angles as possible.^[2] They were not sung like songs, but were recited or chanted.^[3] The distinguishing characteristics of fu include alternating rhyme and prose, varying line lengths, close alliteration, onomatopoeia, loose parallelism, and extensive cataloging of their topics.^[4] Classical fu composers tended to use as wide a vocabulary as possible in their compositions, and therefore fu often contain rare and archaic Chinese words and characters.^[5]

The fu genre came into being around the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC and continued to be regularly used into the Song dynasty (960–1279). Fu were used as grand praises for the imperial courts, palaces, and cities, but were also used to write "fu on things", in which any place, object, or feeling was rhapsodized in exhaustive detail. The largest collections of historical fu are the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan), the Book of Han, New Songs from the Jade Terrace, and official dynastic histories.

There is no counterpart or form similar to the fu genre in Western literature.^[6] During a large part of the 20th century, fu poetry was harshly criticized by Chinese scholars as excessively ornate, lacking in real emotion, and ambiguous in its moral messages.^[7] Because of these historical associations, scholarship on fu poetry in China almost ceased entirely between 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.^[8] Since then, study of fu has gradually returned to its previous level.