Sima Qian also used poems, such as: "Three hundred poems, almost written by sages when they were angry."
Because there are 3 1 1 in the later versions handed down from generation to generation, it is called "Poetry 300" for the convenience of narration. It was renamed The Book of Songs because Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty took The Book of Songs, Li, Yi and Chunqiu as five classics. The Book of Songs is China's first collection of poems. The earliest record is the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the latest work is the Spring and Autumn Period, which spans about five or six hundred years. The origin is centered on the Yellow River basin, south to the north bank of the Yangtze River, and distributed in Shaanxi, Gansu, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Hubei and other places.
Textual research by experts in literature and history shows that The Book of Songs was written after Zhou Wuwang's downfall of Shang Dynasty (BC 1066).
"Song of Zhou" is the earliest work in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and it is the work of noble literati. It is mainly composed of ancestral temple music songs and ode to the gods, and some of them describe agricultural production.
Daya is the product of the prosperous period of the Zhou Dynasty and the only remaining epic in ancient China. There are always different opinions about the creation time of Eighteen Poems of Daya: Zheng Xuan thinks that Poems of King Wen are poems in the era of King Wen and King Wu, and eight poems, such as Poems of Sheng Min to Juan, are poems of Duke Zhou and Wang Cheng. Zhu thought: "it's' elegance' ... this was decided when Duke Zhou made it." But they all think that "Chaya" is a poem in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Xiaoya was born in the late Western Zhou Dynasty and moved eastward.
Truffles and Ode to Shang Dynasty were both produced after Zhou Shi moved eastward (770 BC). According to legend, there was an official who collected poems in the Zhou Dynasty. Every spring, he shakes Muduo and goes deep into the folk to collect folk songs. After sorting out the works that can reflect the people's joys and sorrows, he gave them to the Taishi (the official in charge of music) to compose music and sing them to the Zhou Emperor as a reference for administration. The works of these unknown folk authors occupy most of the space in The Book of Songs, such as The Wind of Fifteen Countries.
The works of aristocratic literati in Zhou Dynasty constitute another part of The Book of Songs. According to the history books, Zhou Gongdan wrote The Wind and the Owl. In a batch of bamboo slips of the Warring States Period (Tsinghua bamboo slips) in Tsinghua University in 2008, it was described that people celebrated their victory in drinking, during which they improvised a poem "Cricket", the content of which is closely related to the existing "Cricket" in The Book of Songs tang style. Joo Won?, the birthplace of the Zhou Dynasty, was suitable for agriculture. Poems such as Gong Liu and Mianmian Guaju in The Scholars all show that Zhou prospered the country with agriculture, and the development of agriculture promoted social progress. After the conquest, the Zhou clan became the master of the world, and the patriarchal clan system, land, slave private ownership and the rule of aristocratic lords became the social and political characteristics of this historical period.
Apart from the tyranny of Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the replacement of Shang and Zhou Dynasties by Western Zhou Dynasty was mainly related to its slavery economic system. After the establishment of the Western Zhou Dynasty, in order to ease the sharp contradiction between production relations and productivity, and ease the class struggle, slavery was turned into serfdom. As Wang Guowei said in On the System of Shang Dynasty: "The political and cultural changes in China were not drastic during the Yin and Zhou Dynasties ... On the surface, the three major changes during the Yin and Zhou Dynasties were nothing more than the rise and fall of a surname and the transfer of the capital. Judging from the implication, the old system is abolished and the new system is promoted, and the old culture is abolished and the new culture is promoted ... "
Compared with Shang Dynasty, the Western Zhou Dynasty made great progress in spiritual civilization due to the great changes in the economic system. As a representative of literature, the appearance of The Book of Songs is an inevitable product of the progress of the times, which in turn promotes the progress of social civilization. It is said that there are as many as 3,000 poems handed down in the Spring and Autumn Period, and now only 3 1 1 is left (including 6 poems with eyes but no poems). After Confucius compiled The Book of Songs, the earliest recorded inheritor was Xia Zi, one of the "Ten Philosophers of Confucius" and one of the 72 sages. He has the deepest understanding of poetry, so he passed it on.
There were three poets in the early Han Dynasty, namely Shen Peigong of Lu, Gu Sheng of Qi and Han Ying of Yan. Qi's poems died in Wei, Lu's poems died in the Western Jin Dynasty, and Han's poems still spread in the Tang Dynasty, with only 10 volume left. The Book of Songs circulated today is a poem by Mao Gong.