Abstract: The fusion of ancient-style and regulated verses in Meng Haoran's five-character poetry exemplifies the complicated relationship between ancient-style and contemporary-style regulated verses in the High Tang. His "regulated verses with ancient quality" had either gentle or steep patterns of tonality, and developed more flexible and consistent structures in variations of parallelism. On the other hand, his "ancient-style verses with regulated quality" were often delicate and fluent in parallelistic transformations. During the High Tang, poetry creations of these two types often shared some themes, and were also related to Meng's political frustrations or personal leisure which in turn reflected the subjectivity of him as an author and, pointed to his poetic ideals. Meng's perception of five-character regulated verses was based not only on his understanding of the basic principles of this genre, but also on his personal experience in ancient-style verses, especially the couplets structure and language style. However, his perception reflected the inner conflict between the two forms. His creation remained limited by the immature status of five-character ancient-style verses in the High Tang.

Key words: Meng Haoran, "regulated verses with ancient quality", "ancient-style verses with regulated verse quality", state of creation, concept