Generally speaking, a city is the political, economic and cultural center of a country. With the emergence and development of cities, there will inevitably be poems reflecting urban life. China's earliest poems reflecting city life began to appear in The Book of Songs, including the description of Haojing in the Western Zhou Dynasty. It was not until the Han Dynasty that poets were interested in urban poetry creation, and the Han Yuefu, which specifically described urban life, appeared. For example, Chang 'an Road, Luoyang Road and Chang 'an Avenue are all narrow and evil, and there is Luo Jing's seal. In the Tang and Song Dynasties, urban poetry involved all aspects of urban life. However, if we compare the prosperity of ancient cities in China with this kind of poems, we can see that the development of ancient city poems in China is not synchronized with the development of cities, but it is particularly weak compared with other poems. The reasons for this situation can be found in these aspects:
One is that the feudal society in China is an agricultural society dominated by a self-sufficient natural economy. Most rulers of past dynasties attached importance to agricultural production and despised commerce, so the social status of businessmen was very low. Yong Zhengdi once said: "The four people are headed by scholars, followed by agriculture and industry and commerce." Under the influence of this idea of "attaching importance to agriculture and neglecting commerce", ancient scholars and officialdom also formed a stubborn concept of neglecting commerce. Under the domination of this thought, it is difficult for a citizen image with the appearance of * * * to enter the creative vision of literati and officialdom, let alone the poetry of feudal orthodox literature.
Secondly, China ancient literati were greatly influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Once the poet can't reach the goal of "saving the world with a quick decision", he will retreat to "thinking about change if he is poor, and be immune to it", with self-cultivation and caring for mountains and rivers as his highest ideal. Taoism's "inaction" and advocating nature, and Zen's "unity of Brahma and Me" thought made ancient literati pay more attention to nature and ignore the creation of urban poetry.
Thirdly, the aesthetic mechanism of China's traditional poetry, which emphasizes subjective lyricism over objective description and narration, restricts the choice of poetic images. In the eyes of ancient poets, natural images are more suitable as the cutting body of poetic images, while urban life, which is mainly presented by objective social images, is not suitable for poetry genre, but more suitable for prose, drama and novel genre. As a result, the theme of urban life gradually gave way to fu, prose, opera and novel, and the description of urban life in poetry became less and less.
For the above reasons, China ancient city poetry failed to keep up with the prosperity and development of the city, and failed to play a prominent role in the field of poetry, which is indeed a pity in literature.