With Qin Taoyu's 秦韜玉 poem "Impoverished Girl" (pin nü 貧女) as the main case study here, the paper addresses the following questions: (1) Why was poetry on this topic created in the Tang Dynasty, but not before? (2) Why did Tang poets begin to write on this new topic? What is the difference between Tang poetry on the "Impoverished Girl" and pre-Tang poetry on the "Impoverished Scholar" (pin shi 貧士)? (3) Although there was quite a number of poems on the "Impoverished Girl", what makes Qin Taoyu's work stands out as an enduring masterpiece? The paper argues that the emergence of this new topic in the late Tang was resulted from three contextual factors, namely socio-political, poetic, and personal. I suggest that the underlying message of the poems on the "Impoverished Scholar" is to endure hardships with a strong will, while the poems on the "Impoverished Girl" are simply written to voice one's grievances. This fundamental difference between the two helps explain why the frustrated Tang poets has a predilection for the latter. Finally, the paper analyses poems on the "Impoverished Girl" from the traditional perspective of gediao shuo 格調說 ("analysis of form and melody") and concludes that Qin's piece has become a masterpiece because it aptly conveys an emotional reality that is personal yet universal.