The earliest works in The Book of Songs were written in the Western Zhou Dynasty and the Spring and Autumn Period. The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems in China. The pre-Qin period was called The Book of Songs, also known as Three Hundred Poems or Three Hundred Poems. It collected 305 poems from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period for about 500 years, among which 6 poems only had titles. In the Western Han Dynasty, it was honored as a Confucian classic, and it was one of the "Six Classics" respected by Confucianism. Originally called The Book of Songs, it has been used ever since. Music is divided into three parts: wind, elegance and ode. Among them, Wind is a local folk song with 15 national styles and 160 songs. "Elegance" is mainly court music songs, divided into elegance and vulgarity, 105; Ode is mainly ancestral temple music songs, with 40 songs. The main methods of expression are fu, bi and xing. "Fu" means paving the way, "Bi" means figuratively, and "Xing" means saying something else first to cause the words to be sung. Folk songs have the highest ideological value and artistic value in The Book of Songs. "Hungry people sing about their food, and laborers sing about their affairs." Vatan, Storytelling and Mang are Feng's representative works. The Book of Songs has a far-reaching influence on the development of poetry in later generations, and has become the source of the realistic tradition of China's classical literature. The Book of Songs handed down in the world is a collection of poems handed down by Mao Heng and Scapharca subcrenata.
Li Bai and others were not born when The Book of Songs was written.