ABSTRACT
Poetry has traditionally been the major vehicle of literary expression in Vit-Nam. It has also been the principal means for the presentation of educational, social, political and other information, hence one may say that among its purposes it was, and is, used for the exhortation of patriotic, nationalist spirit, the warning to outsiders of the seriousness of consequence if they intruded and, during periods of unwanted foreign presence or, even worse, of foreign dominance, it was used for the expression of all varieties of political opinion. Furthermore, in Vit-Nam, one skill that traditionally trained scholar, and potential bureaucrat, learnt to voice and pen was poetry, both as a means of exquisite conversational expression and as evidence of literary command and intellectual prowess. The collaborationist community, accepting French hegemony while modernizing Vietnamese social structure, among which one finds Tn th Tng. The romantics, those seeking forgetfulness, perhaps of defeatist tendency, recalling many poets of the Tng, self-indulgent, and producing exquisite verse.
