Abstract:
The day and the author of The Nineteen Ancient Poems has ever been the hot point in studies of literature in the Han Dynasty and the Wei Kingdom, about which rose different views. Yuwen Suo’an thought that early poems in China were simply a duplicative system, so there was no solid proof for “ancient poems” earlier than those written in the royal title of Jian’an. Muzhai supposed that most of The Nineteen Ancient Poems should have been written by Cao Zhi. Their opinions caused a great wave in the world of literature, greatly advancing the progress of studies of ancient poems in the Han Dynasty and the Wei Kingdom. Later in his Notes to the First Half of Miscellaneous Poems in the Selected Essays in the Royal Title of Zhaoming, Li Shan brought forward his idea that, by the content it concerned, the author of The Green Cypress on the Mound should be an anonymous poet in the East Han Dynasty. Now it is hard to say no to the view that The Green Cypress on the Mound should be written in the East Han Dynasty without new materials. Through careful analysis, this paper thinks that the author of the poems was not Cao Zhi but a scholar of the middle ladder of society, for the poems offered a vivid record of the hazardous situation in society and the mental state of scholars in the late East Han Dynasty.
