The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems in China, and * * * contains 305 poems of the Zhou Dynasty. Originally called "Poetry" or "Poetry 300", Confucian scholars in the Han Dynasty began to call "The Book of Songs". The existing Book of Songs was handed down by Mao Heng in the Han Dynasty, so it is also called Mao Shi.
The Book of Songs is the source of China's poetry and the glorious starting point of China's poetry history. It has many forms: epic, satirical poem, narrative poem, love song, war song, carol, holiday song and labor ballad. Rich in content, it reflects all aspects of social life in the Zhou Dynasty, such as 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 can be said that The Book of Songs is a mirror of Zhou society. The language of The Book of Songs is the most important material to study the general situation of Chinese from the 6th century BC to the 6th century BC.
"Chu Ci", also known as "Chu Ci", is a poetic style created by Qu Yuan, a great poet in the Warring States Period. The works use the literary style and dialect rhyme of Chu area (now around the two lakes) to describe the mountains, rivers and historical customs of Chu area, which has strong local characteristics. In the Han Dynasty, Liu Xiang compiled Qu Yuan's works and Song Yu's works "Cheng Qu Fu" into a collection called Songs of the South. It became a collection of poems that had a far-reaching influence on China literature after The Book of Songs.
As China's first collection of romantic poems, The Songs of the Chu is called "The Songs of the Chu" because its poetic form is formed on the basis of the folk songs of Chu, in which a large number of local products and dialect words of Chu are quoted. The Songs of the South are mainly the works of Qu Yuan, and the representative work is Li Sao, so later generations also call the Songs of the South "Sao Style". At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, Liu Xiang collected the works of Qu Yuan, Song Yu and others and compiled them into an anthology. Chuci has a far-reaching influence on later generations' literature, which not only created the style of writing in later generations, but also influenced the creation of prose in previous dynasties. It is the source of positive romantic poetry creation in China.