'I Rambled and Roamed Together with You':Liu Zhen's (d. 217) Four Poems to Cao Pi

摘要

The Jian'an (196-220) period witnessed a flourishing of "presentation and reply" poetry (zengda shi ). I Many of these poems were written between friends and col-leagues, and as such they often reveal an informal and sometimes intimate relationship be-tween the two parties. In this essay I examine a group of four poems, entitled "To the. Central Commander of Five Guards" , that Liu Zhen J4 (?-217) wrote to Cao Pi (187-226), who was named the Central Commander of Five Guards by his father Cao Cao(155-220) in the sixteenth year of Jian'an (212). My goal is to dem-onstrate that subjective quality of these hitherto little-studied texts manifests a unique re- lationship between Cao Pi and the members of his literary circle at the city of Ye from 211 to 217, a period of vigorous poetic activity in the history of Chinese literature. Unlike the often-romanticized praises of the Caos' (Cao Cao, Cao Pi, and his brother Cao Zhi , 192232) patronage of writers by critics and historians of later periods,2 these contemporaneous.