Download or read book The Songs of the South written by Qu Yuan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Songs of the South is an anthology first compiled in the second century A.D. Its poems, originating from the state of Chu and rooted in Shamanism, are grouped under seventeen titles and contain all that we know of Chinese poetry's ancient beginnings. The earliest poems were composed in the fourth century B.C. and almost half of them are traditionally ascribed to Qu Yuan.