 The Roman love elegies of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid ("Amores", "Heroides"), with their personal phrasing and feeling, may be the thematic ancestor of much medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, and modern lyric poetry, but these works were composed in elegiac couplets and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense.During China's Warring States period, the "Songs of Chu" collected by Qu Yuan and Song Yu defined a new form of poetry that came from the exotic Yangtze Valley, far from the Wei and Yellow River homeland of the traditional four-character verses collected in the "Book of Songs".The varying forms of the new "Chu ci" provided more rhythm and greater latitude of expression.