"Poems Make a Sociable Person" and the Stereotype of Chinese Metrical Verse

"Poems Make a Sociable Person", as one of the traditional Confucian "four functions of poems", had greatly promoted the development of China's classical poetic art by its function of "gathering people to exchange views on poems". The need to "serve the emperor" helped Chinese metrical verse to deviate from the archaic poems and gradually had its unique writing rules and forms of expression. Especially in the early Tang Dynasty, with the strong support of the emperor and the vigorous responsory from scholars and literati, "Poems Make a Sociable Person" developed fast in size, scope, level and the art of poetry kept improving, which resulted in theoretical and practical development of metrical verse and its stereotype.