The Book of Songs is the most ancient and respected of all Chinese literary works. An anthology of three hundred odd poems, mostly of anonymous authorship, it has been revered and studied bu the Chinese people since its compilation approximately 2,500 years ago. Over the centuries, and immense body of scholarship and commentary on this Confucian classic has accumulated. For the most part, traditional scholarship has been concerned with textual and philological problems, or interpretation within a moralistic framework. With few exceptions westerns scholarship and translation has also tended to be philologically oriented in its treatment of this class of world literature. This study by Professor McNaughton, however, is the first major undertaking in English to break with this tradition, and to analyze the individual poems in terms of rhetorical and poetic structures. In this sense, the work is a pioneering one, and the results of his study therefore shed new light on the structures of form and meaning which are to be found in this collection of classical Chinese verse.