Poetry—Vietnam
Chinese chronicles trace the mythic origin of the Vietnamese to a union between a dragon king from the watery south and an immortal fairy queen from the mountainous north some four thousand years ago. Vietnam's history of poetic activity may be as ancient, based on the rich musicality of the Vietnamese language with its six tones and an age-old love of folk song that endures in modern Vietnamese culture. By the end of the tenth century CE, literary intelligentsia influenced by Chinese poetics developed a written poetic tradition in chu Han (Chinese script). By the fifteenth century, a demotic form of Vietnamese writing known as chu nom, or nom, became popular, fostering poetic license to alter strict Chinese metrical patterns to suit Vietnamese language and folk song forms. Chu Han and nom poems persisted until French colonization (1859–1945), when quoc ngu (romanized Vietnamese) gradually superseded these two scripts. Quoc ngu eventually enabled many poets, who had also become enamored of French romanticism, to discard any restrictive residue of Chinese poetics and create new experimental forms of poetry. During the thirty years of struggle for independence (1945–1975), poets split over ideological differences as the country became divided into North and South.
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