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111 The Tz'u as a Poetic Form ‘Each age has a literature distinctive to it: the sao of Ch'u, the fu of Han, the parallel style of the 8ix Dynasties, the shih of T'ang, the tz'u of 8ung, and the ch'ü of Yüan were each the particular literature of their age and later generations were never able to continue them'. 80 begins the Preface to Wang Kuo-wei's Sung Yüan hsi-ch'ü k'ao. The epochal nature of Chinese poetry is a theme often repeated in the Jen-chien tz'u-hua, and certainly merits c10se attention in a study of the history of Chinese poetry. At no time does Wang Kuo-wei imply that any one genre is better than another in the successive emergence of new forms, but he did feel that there were qualitative changes within genres from the ear1ier to later periods. That is to say, a general pattern of rise and fall can be set forth for any genre one chooses to examine. Or恕的s What are tz'u? Where and how did they begin, and how are they different from other forms of poetry? The character tz'u 詞 in its most ordinary meaning is simply ‘word' or ‘expression', as found, for example, in compounds such as yen tz'u 言誦，‘words' ， or ming tz'u 名詞，‘noun'. In this meaning it is similar to the basic meaning of the character tz'u 辭， ‘word'. Both these characters also have the meaning of the words which are combined together to form a composition or a song. That is to say, the Ch'u tz'u 楚辭 is translated as 'The songs of Ch'u'. The compound ko-tz'u 歌詞 means 'the lyrics of a song'. Both characters are found in this sense throughout Chinese texts from pre-Han times. The character tz'u 詞， however, came to have a special meaning as a particular genre of poetry. James R. Hightower's definition of this genre is well put: ‘The tz'u is a song-form characterized by lines of unequal length, prescribed rhyme and tonal sequences, occurring in a large number of variant patterns, each of which bears the name of a musical air'.l 1 Hightower, Topics in Chinese literature, p. 90. ...

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