Xie Lingyun is one of the best-known poets of the entire Six Dynasties period, second only to Tao Yuanming. In contrast to his older contemporary Tao, Xie is known for the difficult language, dense allusions, and frequent parallelisms of his poetry. Xie's greatest fu is "Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains" (Shān jū fù ), a Han-style "grand fu" describing Xie's personal estate that borrows its style from the famous "Fu on the Imperial Park" by Sima Xiangru. Like classical Han fu, the poem uses a large number of obscure and rare characters, but "Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains" is unique in that Xie included his own annotations to the poem, without which the poem would be nearly incomprehensible.
