ALTHOUGH IT IS one of the principal forms of Chinese poetry, the fu is difficult to classify in relation to Western or comparative literary criticism. Historically speaking, the term fu itself seems to originate in the verb “to recite,” and fu poems were originally distinguished by their performance as long recitations rather than songs accompanied by music. To some extent the content of the fu is distinctive, with its frequent adoption of the dialogue form and introduction of philosophical ideas, as well as its implicit political messages. And yet it also overlaps considerably with other kinds of Chinese poetry in its use of rhyme, meter, and other basic verse techniques.

Even though there is no absolute criterion one can use to distinguish fu from other genres of Chinese poetry, nonetheless throughout the history of imperial Chinese literature the fu has been marked as a genre distinct from the lyric (shi 詩), from dramatic poetry, or from song lyrics (ci 詞). The concept of the fu survived because poets self-consciously employed fu in a manner that differentiated it explicitly from other forms of writing. For while it is not always possible to distinguish strictly between fu and other poems in terms of the received texts on their own, fu was vividly distinguished from other forms of writing by its paradigmatic context of composition: a performance at court in front of a royal audience. Even though the fu became a literary genre composed and distributed in written form, the singular quality of the fu was still conceived to be this improvisational quality. To highlight this improvisational quality in the fu, we can examine a minimal pair, namely a fu poem that bears much in common with another, near-contemporary poem in another genre (in this case the sao, i.e., the genre of poems derived from Qu Yuan's “Li sao”). By close comparison of the two texts, we will be able to recognize some of the uniqueness of the fu, which turns out to be a matter of ineffable intention rather than of any fixed rules governing form or content. This chapter concludes with full annotated translations of both “Great Man” (Daren fu 大人賦) and “Far Roaming” (Yuanyou 遠遊).