Poetry is a collection of poems produced in China from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period, including temple worship poems, banquet poems and folk songs of various countries since the Western Zhou Dynasty. At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, Confucius compiled The Book of Songs, making it one of the six Confucian classics, later called The Book of Songs. When Qin Shihuang burned books to bury Confucianism, the Book of Songs was also burned, which was in danger of being destroyed.
The rulers in the early Han Dynasty realized the role of Confucianism in consolidating feudal politics. During the reign of Emperor Huidi, carrying calligraphy and banning books were abolished. The imperial court sent people to search and record ancient books, and some pre-Qin ancient books were discovered one after another. The earliest Confucian classics were handed down by Confucian scholars. The imperial court set up an official school to teach, sort out written books and copy them with the official books prevailing at that time, which was called the Jinwen Jing. Because of the different places and times where lecturers and bibliophiles live, and because of the memory difference or unclear accent in the oral tradition in the past, the sentences and explanations in the manuscripts of The Book of Songs in Shandong, Qi and Han are different. Later, some classics were found on the wall of Confucius' house, which were written in seal script and called ancient classics. At the beginning, ancient classics were not valued by rulers, but were taught by private schools. The book of songs, an ancient prose, is called Mao poetry because it has been sorted out by Mao Ji and Mao Heng.
During the Western Han Dynasty, the three schools of poetry were always in the orthodox position, while Mao's poetry was in the suppressed position. In the early years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the two schools of classical Chinese continued to struggle, but the study of classical Chinese classics was simple and easy to learn, and there was no superstition in it, which expanded the influence and Zhang Di gained the status of a public religion. By the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Zheng Xuan had annotated the Exegetical Biography of Mao Heng's Poems on the basis of Mao Shi, and some theories of three schools of poetry were adopted in the annotation, which realized the integration of ancient and modern classics in the study of The Book of Songs. After the publication of Jian Zheng, the orthodox position of Mao's poems was established, and the three poems gradually disappeared. Qi's poems died at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty because of their empty contents and complicated chapters and sentences. Lu's works were lost in the Western Jin Dynasty, leaving only a remnant tablet of more than 200 words. Most of Han's poems spread around the region and died out in the late Northern Song Dynasty. There is only the biography of Han Poetry, which is not the original work of the poet Han Ying.
Since the Southern Song Dynasty, some scholars began to look for the lost articles and last words of three poems. At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, Wang Yinglin's textual research was a pioneering work, and the ancient meaning of Kai He's The Book of Songs continued to be discovered in the Ming Dynasty. The wind of textual research prevailed in the Qing Dynasty, and Fan Jiaxiang, Ding Yan and others successively made up the examination. Chen Qiaozong has searched five copies of Textual Research on Three Poems. Wang Xianqian's Collection of Three Poems is a collection of three poems, and all the three poems cited in ancient books have been included.
The Book of Songs we are seeing now is basically the system of Mao's poems. The three poems retain different writing and reading methods from Mao's poems, and the text exegesis and content interpretation are also very different, which has certain academic value for us to study the Book of Songs and understand the whole picture of the Book of Songs. No matter how many series of lost works have been made by later generations, there are still too many lost works.