The Book of Songs has a lofty position and far-reaching influence in the history of China literature, which has laid a fine tradition of China's poetry and nurtured generations of poets, thus forming the national characteristics of China's poetry art. It can be said that the Book of Songs is mainly a collection of lyric poems. Since then, China's poetry has advanced along the road of expressing ambition opened by The Book of Songs, and lyric poetry has become the main form of China's poetry.
The author of The Book of Songs is anonymous, and most of them cannot be verified. They were collected by Yin Jifu and edited by Confucius. In the pre-Qin period, the Book of Songs was called "The Book of Songs", or it was called "The Book of Songs 300" by integers. In the Western Han Dynasty, it was honored as a Confucian classic, formerly known as The Book of Songs, which has been in use ever since. The Book of Songs is divided into three parts: style, elegance and ode. "Wind" is a ballad of Zhou Dynasty. Elegant music is the official music of Zhou people, which is divided into harmony and elegance. Ode is a music song used for sacrificial rites in Zhou and aristocratic ancestral temples, which is divided into, and Shang songs.
Confucius once summarized the purpose of the Book of Songs as "innocence" and educated his disciples to read the Book of Songs as their standard of speech and action. Among the pre-Qin philosophers, many people quoted The Book of Songs, such as Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Zhuangzi and Han Feizi. Quote the sentences in the Book of Songs to enhance your persuasiveness. By the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, The Book of Songs was regarded as a classic by Confucianism and became one of the six classics and five classics.
The Book of Songs is rich in content, reflecting 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 is a mirror of the social life of the Zhou Dynasty.