"New Odes of Yutai" is an anthology of poetry compiled in the sixth century AD following the "Selected Works of Zhaoming". An excellent collection of the essence of classical poetry from the Han, Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties.
It is a collection of poems from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty to the Liang Dynasty in the Southern Dynasty. It contains 769 poems, including 8 volumes of five-character poems, 1 volume of song lines, and 1 volume of five-character and four-line poems, totaling 10 volumes. Except for "Song of the Yue People" in Volume 9, which is said to have been composed during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the rest are works from the Han Dynasty to the Liang Dynasty. During the circulation of "New Odes of Yutai", some people made chaos, so some people suspected that this book was not compiled by Xu Ling, but was written by someone later. But this is not enough to be a conclusive conclusion.
According to Xu Ling's "Preface to New Odes of Yutai", the purpose of compiling this book is to "select erotic songs", that is, it mainly collects works about the love between men and women. From the perspective of the breadth of content, it is not as good as "Selected Works" which was written slightly earlier. But compared with the "Selected Works", which is "text-based" as the inclusion standard, it also has unique characteristics. For example, it is not as good as "Selected Works" in which it selects temple poems that praise virtues. The selected articles all use clear language and discard the profound and serious ones. The nursery rhymes recorded in the Han Dynasty and the nursery rhymes of Emperor Hui of Jin Dynasty all fall into this category. It also pays more attention to folk literature, such as the ancient Chinese long narrative poem "The Peacock Flies Southeast", which was first seen in this book. It attaches great importance to the five-character and four-sentence short songs that emerged in the Southern Dynasties, and has been collected in as many as one volume. It has a certain role in promoting the development of the five-character quatrain in the Tang Dynasty. Unlike "Selected Works", it does not include works by living figures, but it includes works by many poets after the middle period of Liang Dynasty. These poems pay more attention to rhythm and counterpoint than "Yongming style", and we can clearly see the maturation process of "modern style poetry". The book contains miscellaneous poems such as Shen Yue's "Eight Odes", which can also be used to understand the integration of poetry and poetry in the late Southern Dynasties and the formation of the style of poetry in the Sui and Tang Dynasties. There are poems selected in "New Odes of Yutai" that can be verified and filled in, such as Cao Zhi's "Abandoned Wife's Poems" and Yu Xin's "Qixi Festival Poems", which are missing from their collections. Ban Jieyu and Bao Linghui The works of female writers such as Liu Lingxian and Liu Lingxian also rely on this book to be preserved and circulated.