The so-called "poetry collection" refers to a political system or cultural system in the Zhou Dynasty. This view mainly comes from the slightly different views in the biography of the ram by Han Shu and He Xiu. Ban Gu believed that there were departments and officials in charge of poetry collection in ancient times, but He Xiu described the process of poetry collection in detail, including the identity of the poet and the way of poetry collection. This statement was not questioned until modern times. Modern and contemporary people generally doubt whether the system of collecting poems in the pre-Qin period really existed, and think that there is no record of collecting poems in the existing pre-Qin classics, and it is impossible to record such systematic and large-scale activities in the classics. Therefore, it is considered that the so-called "poetry collection" is the imagination of the Han people to the pre-Qin system according to the Yuefu system of the Han Dynasty. However, modern scholars are puzzled that if there is no act of collecting poems, how can these poems be collected?
Of course, we can't imagine how these poems are condensed now, and imagination is always meaningless. My personal opinion is that even without this method and system of collecting poems, there are many channels and ways to collect more than 300 poems in the long 500 years, without assuming that it adopts the collection methods and methods that we think are very standardized. In fact, the descriptive imagination about "poetry-picking" is also related to the issues we will discuss below.
It means that it was very early, and it was in the Zhou Dynasty.