Abstract: Poetry critics from the Ming and Qing dynasties explored the different features of the Han and Wei poetries, which resulted in the distinction between the poetries of the Han and Wei dynasties. Their explorations also indicated that the stylistic principles of poetry began to take shape. Wang Shizhen first claimed that Cao Zhi's achievements were lower than Cao Cao's, while Hu Yinglin examined the differences between the Han poetry and the Wei dynasty poetry, maintaining that Han poetry was unadorned and elegantly simple while Wei poetry was embellished with rhetorical strategies. These claims about Han and Wei poetry influenced the selection principles of many poetry anthologies such as Gu Shi Gui (principles of ancient poems) and Gu Shi Yuan (Ancient Poetry Source). Compared with Ming-Dynasty critics, poetry critics of the Qing dynasty highly value the new features in the Wei poetry, because of their wider array of canonical poems and because the promotion of the officials began to be based on the candidates’ poems.

Key words: the Han-Dynasty poetry, the Wei-Dynasty poetry, natural and elegantly simple, the concept of style