About "deleting poems", Sima Qian said in Historical Records Confucius Family that the Book of Songs has more than 3,000 volumes. Confucius deleted the repetitive and impolite books, leaving 305, then classified and adjusted the order, and finally formed the Book of Songs that we see today.
The Book of Songs is China's first collection of poems, which was formed from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period. The "wind" part of The Book of Songs belongs to folk culture. Folk culture is the easiest to produce and the most abundant, that is, love poems, and even some "Li Yue" things. This kind of poem definitely does not conform to Confucius' "ceremony". On the other hand, such poems are easy to be repeated because of the same theme. Therefore, it can be speculated that this part may be the main reason for the "deletion" of holes.
From this point of view, Confucius's "deleting poems" is indeed a pity, because it lost a lot of primitive culture of the ancient people in the pre-Qin period. With regard to "deleting books", Sima Qian thought in Historical Records Confucius Family that Confucius summarized the history and politics of Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and then selected some contents from the documents of the three generations to compile books according to his own ideas and logic.
This kind of behavior is inevitable and even necessary from the current editing work. Therefore, Confucius' "deleting books" cannot be said to be a kind of destruction. Generally speaking, Confucius's "deleting poetry books" should be said that it did not destroy the literature, but preserved and inherited the ancient literature.
In the Spring and Autumn Period, it was generally a chaotic era of "the ceremony collapsed and the music was bad". If Confucius hadn't compiled these books and widely disseminated them as teaching materials, I'm afraid these documents would be difficult to spread to the present.
On the other hand, Confucius' selection, editing and writing of these documents made the meaning of these documents clearer, the arts and sciences more fluent and the structure more reasonable, and the ideas contained in them had a positive and far-reaching impact on China culture.