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This paper focuses on the birth of Yongming 永明 Style poetry in the Southern Qi 南齊 Dynasty, drawing on cultural background to re-examine its significance in the history of Chinese poetry. The Yongming Style heralded a revolution in poetry circles and is a model example of the birth of a new poetics. Yongming poetics is grounded in a profound awareness of the sound of the language that cuts across the boundaries of language and literature. Its prosody developed in step with traditional Chinese phonology, its leading figures guiding the construction of systems of phonological knowledge. By comparing Chinese and Sanskrit, Yongming poets established the principles for determining pronunciation by phonological segmentation, and by chanting and reading aloud, they made observations about the musicality of the language itself. The decomposability of phonology allowed them to grasp how to manipulate phonology in poetry, establishing verifiable rules. Poets repositioned the human voice as the starting point for the laws of phonology, emphasizing the fundamental place of language; through 'inner listening,' they made connections between spoken sounds and one's inner voice. They believed that the ideal tonal prosody would be the outward manifestation of the inner voice and so advocated an aesthetics of prosody that took the sound of the inner voice as its starting point. In practice, Yongming poetics shaped an aesthetic in the sound-environment of the thenpopular five-character line form that stressed the use of alliteration and rhyme, particularly between the last characters of each line and the first two and final three characters of a line. It sparked a significant, irresistible movement for innovation in form in later poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reception of the Caotang shiyu (CTSY) ... in the early Qing was closely related to changes in the literary discourse on Song-ci poetry that took place during this period. In his highly influential Cizong ..., Zhu Yizun ... (1629-1709) claimed that the CTSY had adversely affected the practice of ci-composition in the Ming and early Qing, a criticism that later became the basis for orthodox discourse on ci-poetics. This discourse, however, was marred by vague and inaccurate discussions. Through a statistical analysis of zhuihe compositions of the early Qing, i.e. compositions set to the rhyming schemes of works by previous authors, this paper attempts to reconstruct the stylistic practice of the time. The analysis shows that the popular aesthetics exemplified in the CTSY seem to have enjoyed great prevalence among contemporary poets, a preference that Zhu made a conscientious effort to undermine by adopting a different set of selectional strategies for his own compilation. But it was to be another decade before the new fashion advocated by Zhu finally gained acceptance as the standard practice in ciwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]