The Book of Songs is the first collection of poems in the history of China, with 305 poems from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty (before 1 1 century) to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (before the 7th century). The Book of Songs is divided into three parts: style, elegance and ode. "Wind" refers to the folk songs of fifteen vassal States, with *** 160 songs; Ya is a musical song near the capital of Zhou Dynasty, 105; Ode is a sport used by the king to worship the ancestral temple, aiming at praising the great achievements of ancestors and the great power of ghosts and gods, including sacrificial songs and hymns. There are 40 articles.
As far as form is concerned, The Book of Songs is mainly composed of four-character poems, with occasional two-character, three-character, five-character, six-character, seven-character, eight-character and other sentence patterns. At the same time, a large number of overlapping words, polyphony and rhymes are used, which makes this literary work appear flexible and diverse, and it is highly musical to read at will. As far as content is concerned, Feng is the essence of The Book of Songs. Because these poems come from the folk, they are not or rarely carved, showing the colorful folk songs of the Zhou Dynasty. Works in the Wind reflects the real life of ordinary workers, such as Guan Ju and Out of the East Gate, and expresses the yearning and pursuit of young men and women for happy love. "Cutting Tan" and "New Moon" express angry slaves' doubts about slave owners who get something for nothing; "Water of Yang", "The Battle of Gentlemen" and so on.
The composition of the authors of The Book of Songs is very complicated. If the identity of the author in the poem is regarded as the identity of the author, then the author of the poem includes both laborers and soldiers, and a considerable number of people belonging to the "scholar" and "gentleman" classes. At that time, "scholar" belonged to the lowest nobility, and "scholar" was a general term for nobility. In addition, there are many unidentified people.
The original main purpose of the works in The Book of Songs is to be sung by people as part of various ceremonies, to entertain people and to express the author's views on social and political issues. But in the end, The Book of Songs has gradually become a cultural textbook widely used in aristocratic education, and learning the Book of Songs has become a necessary cultural accomplishment for aristocratic people and is listed as one of the most important classics in China. On the one hand, this kind of education has the function of beautifying language, especially in social occasions, and it is often necessary to quote poems from the Book of Songs to express meaning in a tortuous way. The Analects of Confucius recorded Confucius' words: "If you don't learn the Book of Songs, you have nothing to say", which gave the Book of Songs a very high status.
Generally speaking, The Book of Songs is the glorious starting point of China literature and the symbol of the early development of China literature. Its content involves all aspects of China's early social life, such as labor and love, war and corvee, oppression and resistance, customs and marriage, ancestor worship and feasting, and even the astronomical phenomena, landforms, animals, plants and so on. 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.