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The Han Dynasty (202 B.C. - 220 A.D.) was the third important phase in the development of Chinese poetry. The main poetry of these times was the Yuefu Song.
There were two meanings of the word Yuefu. One was the name of a music organization in the Han Dynasty; the other was the name of the folk songs that the organization collected.
The music office in the Han Dynasty had three duties:
-- To create the music for the poems of the literati.
-- To play the music to accompany the poems.
-- To collect the folk songs and ballads from around the country.
These collected folk songs and ballads were called Yuefu Shi -- Yuefu Poems or Han Yuefu in the Han Dynasty. One hundred and thirty six poems that were collected by the officers of the Western Han Dynasty are still extant. They were the highest achievement of Han Dynasty poetry.
The Yuefu Poems in the Han Dynasty followed the tradition of Shi Jing and expressed thoughts and feelings of civilians in its own time; they mainly reflected the poor life of ordinary people, the pain of war and corv辿e, love and labor.
The difference was that Shi Jing mainly expressed people's emotions while Yuefu was mainly narrative.
The linguistic form of the Yuefu poetry mainly uses five characters per line and is based on the poems of Shi Jing which have four characters per line, its sentences are sometimes long and sometimes short and its language is natural and unaffected.
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