In order to facilitate everyone to understand the artistic characteristics and genre classification of poetry, first of all, introduce the development history of classical poetry.
In the history of China literature, the earliest poem we can see is The Book of Songs, which is about 3000 years ago. This is the earliest collection of poems in China, with a total of 305 poems, which was called "Poetry" or "Poetry 300" in ancient times. Its content consists of three parts: wind, elegance and praise, which are divided from the perspective of music. There are three ways of expression: Fu, Bi and Xing. Therefore, predecessors called it "wind, elegance, praise" and "fu, comparison, xing" six-meaning poems. Syntactically, language is basically four words and one sentence.
Following the Book of Songs, in the 4th century BC, a new style of poetry appeared in the State of Chu, called Songs of the Chu, and its founder was Qu Yuan. Later, the Han people compiled the works written by Qu Yuan, Song Yu and others into a book called Songs of the South. The Songs of Chu broke through four sentences in the Book of Songs and developed into five-character sentences and seven-character sentences, that is, even sentences (four words in a sentence) were changed into odd sentences (five words in a sentence and seven words in a sentence), which not only better expressed thoughts and feelings, but also made the rhythm and rhythm more musical.
In the Han Dynasty, Yuefu Poetry, a poem sung with music, appeared. There are four words, five words and miscellaneous words in language, but most of them are five words. Later, the literati headed by Cao Cao and his son and Tao Yuanming developed five-character poems. At the same time, seven-character poems have also developed greatly.
Before Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the rhythm and rhyme of poetry had not formed a rule that everyone followed, but the author wrote it according to his personal content needs and rhyme feeling. In the Wei and Jin Dynasties, influenced by Indian Sanskrit phonology (called Tianzhu in ancient times), phonology in China developed. Zhou Ai and Shen Yue of Qi Liang summed up the pronunciation rules of Chinese characters and put forward the theories of "four tones" and "eight diseases", which made poetry creation develop from natural rhythm to pursuit of rhythm, and the nature of paying attention to levelness and rhythm appeared in poetry writing, forming the main content of metrical poetry.
Tang Dynasty is the heyday of China's poetry development and the golden age of classical poetry. On the basis of inheriting the poems of the previous generation, the poems of the Tang Dynasty developed further and formed a fixed classification. There are two kinds of classification, one is ancient poetry, also called ancient style; The so-called ancient poetry refers to imitating the traditional poetry style before the Tang Dynasty, which has no certain meter, can be divided into length, is relatively free in rhyme and level, and the number of words in the sentence is neat and irregular; Among them, there are mainly five-character ancient style and seven-character ancient style. Second, modern poetry, also known as modern poetry (this "modern" refers to the Tang Dynasty), is what we call metrical poetry; Modern poetry is not as free as classical poetry, and it has strict requirements in length, rhyme, parallelism and antithesis. Basically, it can be divided into two types: metrical poems and quatrains. Rhymes and quatrains are divided into five words and seven words, and rhymes with more than eight sentences are called rhymes.
In the middle Tang Dynasty, a new genre was derived from poetry, which was the most developed in the Song Dynasty, namely Ci. Because words originate from poetry, words are also called "poems"; In addition, because of the different lengths of words in sentences, the ancients also called them "long and short sentences".
In the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, a new genre appeared, called Qu, also called Sanqu. Qu can be said to be another word. So what's the difference between it and words? The language is closer to spoken English except that the accompaniment instruments are different when singing. The most prominent feature is that interlining can be added. For example, Zhang's "One of the Three Leisure Songs" said, "Yesterday, the flowers are bright, but now it is raining, and the society is suffering. (No) Mud stinks, (How to) kill (this) sun and moon. " The words in brackets are called lines.
The above briefly introduces the development history of China's classical poetry.