1. According to the rhythm, poetry can be divided into two categories: ancient poetry and modern poetry.
2. According to the content, it can be divided into narrative poems, lyric poems, farewell poems, frontier poems, pastoral poems, nostalgic poems (poems about history), mourning poems and satirical poems.
The questions about all kinds of poems are 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-character poems. Du Fu's poems compiled by Guo Zhida in Song Dynasty can be 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, seven-character poems and rare six-character poems.
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. An ancient celestial body and a near celestial body
Classical poetry is written in the style of ancient poetry. In the eyes of the Tang people, everything from The Book of Songs to Geng Xin in the Southern and Northern Dynasties is ancient. Therefore, there is no certain standard for imitating ancient poetry. However, the ancient poems written by poets are consistent in one thing, that is, they are not bound by the rhythm of modern poetry. We can say that all poems that are not bound by the rhythm of modern poetry are ancient poems.
Yuefu came into being in the Han Dynasty and 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. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, with the gradual formation of new music, the lyrics of new music appeared, called "Ci". Ci probably originated in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. In the transitional period after the decline of Yuefu and before the appearance of Ci, modern poetry was adopted as lyrics with new music. Wang Wei's Cheng Wei Qu and Li Bai's Qing Ping Diao are both forms of modern poetry.
Modern poetry is represented by metrical poetry. Metric poems pay attention to rhyme, flatness and antithesis. 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 is stipulated;
D. every article should have antithesis, and the position 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 characters, and the number of rhymes is often indicated on the title. For example, Du Fu's "Thirty-six Rhymes of Sleeping Boat in the Rain" is 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 if it rhymes, it is not bound by the rules of leveling in modern poetry. This can be classified as classical poetry.
Rhythm not only balances the rhyme, but also follows the leveling rule of modern poetry. Formally, they are equivalent to half a metrical poem. This can be classified as modern poetry.
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.
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, mainly three, five and seven sentences, among which there are occasionally four, six and more than seven words. Miscellaneous poems generally do not have another category, only belong to the seven ancient. 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.
(1) also has a long law of seven words, such as Du Fu's two poems Tomb-Sweeping Day.
② Guo sorted out Du Fu's poems and classified most quatrains into modern poems. Yuan Zhen simply classified this quatrain as a metrical poem in Qing Ji.
Classification of modern poetry
1. Narrative poems and lyric poems.
2. Metric poems, free poems and prose poems. This is classified according to the phonological meter and structural form of the language of the work.