China's earliest poetry collection is
The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems in China. It is the beginning of China's ancient poetry, with a collection of 305 ancient poems from 1 1 century to the 6th century BC. In addition, there are six poems with titles and no content, which are called sheng poems. No content is Nanchang, Bai Hua, Shu Hua, Youkang, Chongwu and You Yi. It reflects the social outlook of about 500 years from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period. The author of The Book of Songs is unknown. It was collected by Yin Jifu and edited by Confucius. At first, it was just called "Poetry" or "Poetry 300". In the Western Han Dynasty, it was regarded as a Confucian classic and called The Book of Songs. There are three kinds of editors in The Book of Songs: style, elegance and ode. "Wind" is a ballad of Zhou Dynasty. Elegant music is the official music of Zhou people, which is divided into harmony and elegance. Ode is a musical song used for sacrificial rites in Zhou and noble ancestral temples, which is divided into ode to, and ode to Shang. The Book of Songs is rich in content, reflecting labor and love, war and corvee, oppression and resistance, customs and marriage, ancestor worship and feasting, and even astronomical phenomena, landforms, animals and plants. It is a mirror of the social life of the Zhou Dynasty.