Wang Can
A number of "fu" writers from the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD became considered great "fu" poets, and were noted for their descriptions of the chaos and destruction following the collapse of the Han dynasty. Wang Can, who lived as a refugee in Chu following the assassination of Dong Zhuo in AD 192, wrote a famous "fu" entitled ""Fu" on Climbing the Tower" () in which Wang movingly describes climbing a tower near Jingzhou and gazing longingly in the direction of his home in Luoyang. Poets often used subjects of descriptive "fu" poems to symbolize themselves, as in ""Fu" on the Parrot" (), by Mi Heng, in which Mi uses a caged parrot as an allegory for a scholar whose talents go unrecognized and whose inability to control his tongue results in his captivity. During the Three Kingdoms period, the court of the warlord Cao Cao and his sons Cao Pi and Cao Zhi became a famous literary salon, and a number of "fu" poems from their court have survived to modern times. Cao Zhi's ""Fu" on the Luo River Goddess" () uses an ancient motif from the "Verses of Chu" in which the author's ultimately unfulfilled erotic desire for a goddess symbolically represents their frustration in failing to be given a high-ranking position at court or in government.