Metaphysical Poetry refers to a genre of Chinese poetry prevailed in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420), which is in an effort to elucidate the Taoism and Buddhism philosophy.

In the Wei and Jin dynasties (220-420), the society became more and more turbulent. In order to stay away from chaos, the scholar-bureaucrats and literati usually pinned hope on metaphysics. To the end of the Western Jin Dynasty (265-316), this social ethos gradually influenced the area of poetry. In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Buddhism became popular and it gradually blended with local metaphysics. A considerable number of literati took the form of the poetry to express their own understandings of metaphysical philosophy. It is said that almost all the poetries at that time took Laozi as the tenet, and Fu was considered only the footnotes of Zhuangzi.

The emergence of this genre of poetry reflected the influence of metaphysics in the area of literature, but its substance was different from the thoughts of early metaphysicians such as Wang Bi, He Yan, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang. At the end of the Western Jin Dynasty, the combination of local metaphysics and Buddhism became the thoughts of distinguished and privileged families, reflecting the escapism of the scholar-bureaucrats at that time. Sun Chuo and Xu Xun were the representative poets of Metaphysical Poetry, but the literary value of their works was not high and thus most of their works were not handed down. There were only twelve extant poems of Sun Chuo and three of Xu Xun. The Metaphysical Poetry attached much importance to artistic concepts, and even the descriptions of natural sceneries were usually used as the subjects to appreciate metaphysics. Among them, there were some written very gracefully with noticeable literary talent. The poems of natural scenery written by Xie Lingyun and Tao Yuanming were also influenced by the Metaphysical Poetry in some way.