The tz'u, or lyric, reached its full maturity in China during the eleventh century and the first quarter of the twelfth. Until now this important poetic genre has been little known to English readers, and James J. Y. Liu's book is the first to deal systematically and critically with it. He does so by examining the work of six representative poets of the period.

The poems are analyzed in terms of their "exploration of worlds," by which the author means the poet's probing of the natural world and the human world in which he lives, as well as of his own mind. This leads into a...

The tz'u, or lyric, reached its full maturity in China during the eleventh century and the first quarter of the twelfth. Until now this important poetic genre has been little known to English readers, and James J. Y. Liu's book is the first to deal systematically and critically with it. He does so by examining the work of six representative poets of the period.

The poems are analyzed in terms of their "exploration of worlds," by which the author means the poet's probing of the natural world and the human world in which he lives, as well as of his own mind. This leads into a...