Oral Formula and Intertextuality in the Chinese “Folk” Tradition (Yuefu)

Abstract Previous interpretations of early Chinese poetry (especially Han and Six Dynasties yuefu, or folk poetry) in terms of Milman Parry's and Albert Lord's oral-traditional poetics have run into a variety of conceptual and practical difficulties. I attempt to offer a more fruitful reading of the yuefu corpus in terms of orality, drawing in part on a re-reading of Parry and Lord and in part on recent linguistics-oriented scholarship in Classics. Through an analysis of three anonymous yuefu, and two by named authors (Shen Yue and Xiao Tong), I argue for the interpretation of the anonymous poems as constructed on principles familiar from oral poetics, such as the use of formulaic systems for generating phrases, and show that the yuefu by named poets are constructed differently. Similarly, I demonstrate that the anonymous poems, while seemingly random in thematic sequencing, share a division into six-line units, while the yuefu by named poets are more tightly integrated thematically but divided into units of irregular length. An understanding of the techniques of composition used for these two categories of poems is crucial, I argue, to their interpretation.