Poetry is one of the basic literary genres. Preface to Poetry: "A poet, where he has ambition, has ambition in his heart and speaks with poetry." The difference between poems and songs is that poems are mainly recited, while songs are mainly sung. The so-called poem should recite its words, and the song should sing its voice. Poetry is mostly written for feelings. Poetry is one of the most common arts, which falls in every corner of human society like sunshine.
Our ancestors, primitive humans, could not understand many natural phenomena such as wind, electricity, thunder and rain, so they all came down to the gods. Primitive humans sang and danced to the gods out of awe, expressing people's expectations-good weather, abundant crops and so on. This is the origin of poetry.
It originated from religion. There is another form, which comes from labor. Primitive people made simple and rhythmic cries while working, so as to forget the temporary pain and spirit brought by labor and coordinate their actions. Gradually, this simple and rhythmic cry has developed into a poem that imitates the voice of labor itself and expresses the feelings of workers themselves. Mr. Lu Xun once said: "Poetry is verse, which occurs during labor; Fiction is prose, which happens from rest. " Therefore, we say that poetry is a universal art and the oldest literary style.
The most essential feature of poetry is lyrical beauty. No matter novels, essays, plays and the most beautiful places, the aura of poetry is shining. Therefore, poetry is literature in literature. Poetry is everywhere in the art field, and the beauty of poetry is the highest embodiment of the universal factors of artistic beauty. The beauty of poetry also appears in the non-literary field from time to time. Exquisite fragments in scientific works, even in people's life and work, exude wisdom and brilliance, with traces of poetry.
Poetry is not only poetry, but also lyrical beauty, which is the common quality of all literary styles and artistic types. Therefore, poetry is a universal art, even beyond the boundaries of art.
2. How to write a poem
If you want to write a good poem, you must read the history of poetry. Imitating predecessors' works is a good way to learn to write. People don't have me, people have me, otherwise don't write, otherwise you will always change. Good poetry is alive, life is not easy to create, and if our life doesn't shine, we can't write good poetry. The feeling of life is the crystallization of poetry. Poetry should have artistic conception. A poem can be a universe or an onion. Poets are best thinkers and philosophers, and philosophers and thinkers are best poets. Write about me, write about me, write about all beings, write about life. People without feelings are not called people, and poems without feelings are not called poems. Poetry is not equal to romance, and poetry is not equal to beauty.
Many problems are that one sentence can express what a poem wants to express. Not all the languages of a poem are used to express the same connotation. They are scattered everywhere. Playing with language is fatal to a poem, and most of the lace and bits and pieces of language are unnecessary. Don't use complicated language to express simple things, so that simple things are complicated by those words. Language should not be an obstacle to reading. Readers should not go through the forest of language first, and then distinguish what is happening behind the forest. Don't let readers see your language, let them see your heart, let them see everything you want them to see through your words, not the miasma of words. Readers should not doubt your writing. Don't be suspicious in writing, even complex sentences should exist in people's minds, otherwise writing will be lifeless and lifeless. The organization of words should not make people feel sleepy. I believe that reading can make people awake, but not make people read in a daze. That's not a gobbledygook. The content of gobbledygook is quite good, and gobbledygook is a conscious reader. Phonology cannot affect the context, and phonology and context should be unified.
You can write anything with words, but not everything is called poetry. Poetry is a kind of advanced spirit. What he expressed is beyond the comprehension of vulgar people. If you want to write poetry, your inner world must not be mediocre. If you want to write great poems, you must have noble qualities and brilliant spirit. Not a person who can write can become a poet, nor can a person with rich feelings become a poet. Poet is one of the representatives of advanced civilization and one of the most ordinary people, but poetry is absolutely great. There are many things that can be called poems, but there are not many words that can be called poems in the world.
There are many kinds of poems. What kind of poems should we learn to write? As long as it is a new poem, there is no limit to what kind of poem it is. For example, narrative poems and lyric poems can be written in content, and free poems or prose poems can also be written in form.
How to write poetry? After learning poetry, we should pay attention to the following points:
① Refine the theme in the process of feeling life, with a vivid image. "Ask where the canal is so clear, only the source is flowing water." Life is the source of our writing. Usually, when we write a composition, we always emphasize writing about our own life and our real feelings. You should do the same when you write poetry. For your true feelings, we should focus on writing specific images and use images to reflect our thoughts and opinions.
(2) Grasp the people or things that feel the deepest in life to conceive ideas and express rich feelings. People always have feelings, and poetry is the most lyric literary form. Because poetry is often emotional, and beautiful poetry is always produced when feelings are stirring. Let's take a look at what we have learned, Spring and Snow in Qinyuan, Bai Xuege Farewell Field-Secretary Wu Comes Home, Premier Zhou, and Cane Forest-Green Curtain. Which one is not the poet's emotional eruption? When we have feelings for someone, something or something, it is the basis of writing a good poem to grasp our feelings and express them in the form of poetry.
③ The language is concise, accurate, vivid, fluent and full of rhythm. Whether poetry is poetry or not, it is different from other styles in language use after all. The language of poetry is more refined than other styles, so we should pay attention to this difference, capture the best shots in life and draw vivid images with the most refined language; The language of poetry has a sense of rhythm, so we can try to rhyme in the process of writing poetry, so that our poetry gives people a sense of beauty.
④ When writing poetry, you can use various rhetorical devices such as metaphor, personification and exaggeration, and you can also use symbols and comparisons.
3. What kinds of poems are there?
The question about the type of poetry is quite complicated. The editor of 300 Tang Poems divides poems into three categories: classical poems, regular poems and quatrains, all of which are equipped with Yuefu. Ancient poems, regular poems and quatrains are divided into five words and seven words respectively. This is a kind of division. The classification of Shen Deqian's Poems on Tang Poetry is slightly different: he did not separate Yuefu, but added the category of "five-word long method". Du Fu's poems compiled by Guo Zhida in Song Dynasty are simply divided into two categories: ancient poems and modern poems. Now we try to discuss the above three classifications with reference to other classifications.
From the perspective of meter, poetry can be divided into classical poetry and modern poetry. Ancient poetry is also called ancient poetry or ancient style; Modern poetry is also called modern poetry. From the word count, there are four-character poems, five-character poems and seven-character poems [1]. After the Tang Dynasty, there were few four-character poems, so the general poetry collections were only divided into five-character poems and seven-character poems.
(1) Ancient celestial bodies and near celestial bodies
Classical poetry is written in the style of ancient poetry. In the eyes of the Tang people, everything from The Book of Songs to Yu Xin in the Southern and Northern Dynasties is ancient. Therefore, there is no certain scale for the so-called ancient poetry style. However, the ancient poems written by poets are consistent in one thing, that is, they are not bound by modern poetic rules. We can say that anything that is not bound by the law of physical proximity is an ancient poem.
Yuefu, which originated in the Han Dynasty, was originally accompanied by music, so it was called Yuefu or Yuefu poetry. This kind of Yuefu poetry is called Qu, Ci, Song and Xing. After the Tang Dynasty, the ancient poems written by literati imitating this style were also called "Yuefu", but they were no longer named as such. With the gradual formation of new music in Sui and Tang Dynasties, the lyrics of new music appeared later, called "Ci". Ci probably happened in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. In the transitional period after the decline of Yuefu and before the appearance of Ci, the lyrics of new music adopted modern poetry. For example, Wang Wei's Cheng Wei Qu and Li Bai's Qing Ping Diao are both cases of modern poetry.
Modern poetry is represented by metrical poetry. There are many subtle rhymes, levels and antitheses in metrical poems. Because the meter is very strict, it is called meter poem. Rhyme has the following four characteristics:
A, each song is limited to eight sentences, with 40 words in five laws and 56 words in seven laws.
B, flat rhyme;
C, the level of each sentence has provisions;
D, every article should have antithesis, and the status of antithesis is also stipulated.
There is a kind of metrical poem with more than eight sentences, which is called long law. Dragon law is naturally a modern poem. The long method is generally five words [2], and the number of rhymes is often indicated on the topic. For example, Du Fu's book "Sleeping on a Boat with Wind Disease", 360 words; Bai Juyi's "Poems with Hundred Rhymes" is a thousand words. This long method uses antithesis except tail (or head-tail), so it is also called parallelism.
Four-line poems are half as many words as ordinary poems. Five-character quatrains are only twenty crosses, and seven-character quatrains are only twenty-eight. In fact, quatrains can be divided into ancient quatrains and strict quatrains.
Rhyme can be used in ancient times. Even the leveling is not bound by the leveling rules of modern poetry. This can be classified as classical poetry.
Rhythm not only balances the rhyme, but also follows the law of leveling in modern poetry. In the context, they are equal to half a poem. This can be classified as modern poetry. [3]
To sum up, the so-called ancient poetry belongs to ancient poetry, while the regular poetry (including long law) belongs to modern poetry. Yuefu and quatrains, some belong to ancient style, some belong to modern poetry.
(2) Five words and seven words
Five words are five words and seven words are seven words. Five-character ancient poems are referred to as five ancient poems, and seven-character ancient poems are referred to as seven ancient poems. Five-character poems are referred to as five laws, and seven-character poems are referred to as seven laws; Five-character quatrains are referred to as five-character quatrains, and seven-character quatrains are referred to as seven-character quatrains.
Ancient styles are divided into five ancient styles and seven ancient styles, which is only a rough division. In fact, in addition to five words and seven words, there are so-called miscellaneous words. Miscellaneous words refer to long and short sentences mixed together, especially three, five and seven sentences, among which there are occasionally four, six and more than seven words. Miscellaneous poems are generally not classified into one category, but only seven ancient poems. Even if there are no seven words in the article, as long as they are long and short sentences, they will be classified as seven ancient. This is a conventional classification and has no theoretical basis.
Six-character rhymes are rare.
[2] There are also seven-character long poems, such as Du Fu's Qingming.
[3] Guo Zhida compiled Du Fu's poems and classified most quatrains as modern poems. Yuan Zhen's Collection of Bai Changqing simply classified this quatrain as a metrical poem.