Poetry is a literary genre. It requires the use of highly condensed language to vividly express the author's rich thoughts and feelings, focus on reflecting social life, and have a certain rhythm. It requires a highly concentrated summary and reflection of social life, and is saturated with the author's rich thoughts, feelings and imagination. The language is concise and vivid, and has a certain rhythm. It is generally arranged in lines. It appears earliest among various literary genres. In ancient China, those who talked about not being happy were called poems, and those who were happy were called songs. Nowadays, they are generally called poetry.
Characteristics of poetry
1. The content of poetry is the most concentrated reflection of social life.
2. Poetry is rich in emotion and imagination.
3. The language of poetry has the characteristics of conciseness, image, harmonious tone and distinctive rhythm.
4. The form of poetry: it is not based on sentences, but on behavioral units. The division of lines is mainly based on rhythm, not meaning.
Classification of poetry
There are many types of poetry, and their categories are also different according to different classification standards. The common categories are as follows.
(1) According to content and expression, there are lyric poems and narrative poems.
1. Lyrical poetry. The main way of expression is to express emotions, focusing on expressing the author's inner feelings and experience of social life. Generally, it does not specifically describe the whole process of life or things, does not have a complete storyline, and does not create a complete character image. It only expresses the author's inner emotions through the depiction of some life fragments or things. For example, Fang Weide's "Chasing the Injury of Xu Zhimo" was written three years after Xu Zhimo's death. It reflects the memory of missing friends and the melancholy and sadness of life experience. "Now I can only remember you blankly, / Just as you can only remember us blankly; / The loneliness behind you is so ordinary, but the sad thing is that there is a lonely heart in front of us. Heart. / When you left, you never looked back, / People shouted that you turned into a god, turned into a star; / turned into the colorful clouds on Mount Tai, your death was a miracle, / I know your heart Said: I'm dead, it's over, you don't have to worry anymore. / Now you have gone far away, and there is no trace of you. I have long been alienated from you in every memory. You are like autumn leaves falling to the ground; / Listen, in this deep place. In the deep night, is there ever a sound? /'Zhimo, you've been gone, you've been gone for three years, I remember you! '" The lyric is both direct and insightful. The former expresses one's heart directly, while the latter relies on people, things, objects, and reasons to express emotions. It mainly expresses emotions through scenes, embodies emotions with principles, expresses ambitions based on things, and expresses emotions due to events, etc. For example, in "Spring Resentment" by Jin Changxu, "When you beat up the yellow oriole, don't teach it to cry on the branches. When it crows, it will frighten the concubine's dream, and she will not be able to reach western Liaoning."
2. Narrative poetry. By narrating storylines and shaping characters, it reflects social life and writes the author's understanding and emotions of society and life. It's somewhere between poetry and fiction. But it is not a detailed description like a novel, but a concise summary in the form of poetry, focusing on expressing the poet's emotions. Such as "Peacock Flies Southeast", "Mulan Ci", "Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang" and so on.
(2) According to the form of expression, there are metrical poetry, free poetry, folk songs, and prose poetry.
1. Metrical poetry. It is written according to a certain rhythm, with neat style and rigorous rhythm. There are strict regulations on the number of words, level, antithesis, and rhyme of each sentence. It can be said that poetry has definite lines, lines have definite words, and words have definite rhymes. Such as ancient rhymed poems, quatrains, lyrics, songs, etc.
2. Free verse. Compared with the metrical restrictions of poetry, the sentence structure, composition, and rhyme of poetry are relatively casual, and the author can organize and arrange the words according to lyrical needs from an early age. But it is not "absolute freedom". There still needs to be a rhythm formed by language and rhythm. For example, Hu Shi's "The Crow": "I get up early in the morning, / Stand in the corner of other people's houses and cry dumbly. / People hate me and say I am unlucky: - / I can't murmur to please others!"
3. Folk songs. The people collectively create and spread the word of mouth. The emotion is sincere, with a strong flavor of life and labor, the style is fresh and vigorous, the form is lively and free, the language is simple, and metaphors and exaggerations are often used to create poetic images. For example, "Midnight Song": "When I first wanted to meet a man, my two minds were in the same mood. Wearing silk threads is like a broken machine, how can I realize that (by mistake) they are not matched." Liu Dabai's "Ballad of Selling Cloth": "My sister-in-law weaves cloth, and my brother sells cloth." Sell ??cloth and buy rice, and you will have enough to eat." There are also poems such as "The country is a blur, the wells are black, the yellow dogs are white, and the white dogs are swollen." Another example is the seventeen-character poem: "The distribution is in Yunyang." "Seeing my uncle is like seeing my mother. They both shed tears,"
4. Prose poem. Developed in modern times, it has the characteristics of both lyric poetry and lyric prose. It is a clever fusion of some expressive elements of poetry and some reproducible elements of prose. It uses the flexible form of prose to convey concise and concise poetic images. Although it is not arranged in lines and rhymes like poetry, its language still has an inherent sense of rhythm and musical beauty. It mostly uses metaphors and symbols in its artistic techniques. In a short space of a few hundred words, it integrates poetry, painting, and philosophy into a poetic realm where scenes blend together. Rabindranath Tagore's "New Moon Poems", Lu Xun's "Wild Grass", and Guo Feng's "The Leaf Flute" are all excellent prose poems.