Yang Xiong was a Chinese philosopher, poet, and politician of the Western Han dynasty known for his philosophical writings and fu poetry compositions.

Fu, often translated "rhapsody" or "poetic exposition", is a form of Chinese rhymed prose that was the dominant literary form in China during the Han dynasty. Fu are intermediary pieces between poetry and prose in which a place, object, feeling, or other subject is described and rhapsodized in exhaustive detail and from as many angles as possible. They were not sung like songs, but were recited or chanted. The distinguishing characteristics of fu include alternating rhyme and prose, varying line lengths, close alliteration, onomatopoeia, loose parallelism, and extensive cataloging of their topics. Classical fu composers tended to use as wide a vocabulary as possible in their compositions, and therefore fu often contain rare and archaic Chinese words and characters.