Abstract: As a defining representative of literature born of turbulent times, Jian’an poetry occupies a singular place in the Chinese classical tradition, distinguished by its vigorous yet grief-laden temperament and its elevation of Jian'an fenggu (“the Jian’an spirit”) as an enduring aesthetic ideal. Yet behind the brilliance of this legacy, epidemic and warfare were constant presences; the relentless succession of natural calamities and human catastrophes gave rise to an abundance of death-centered writing in the poetry of this period. Shadowed by the pervasive threat of death in an age of disorder, Jian’an poets inherited the life-consciousness of the late Han while channeling it into works of intense emotional concentration — poetry grounded in the existential logic of survival and destruction, and animated by the interlocking themes of lamentation over transience, disillusionment, the confrontation with death, and the longing for renewal. As one of the eternal motifs of literary creation, death profoundly shaped the trajectory of poetic composition throughout the Jian’an period. As a pivotal link in the continuum of Chinese classical poetry, Jian’an verse and its writing of death stand as a vital medium through which the evolution of Chinese philosophy of life was both registered and transmitted.