Chu Ci is a new style poem that originated in Chu area in the southern Yangtze River valley in the middle and late Warring States period. Chu poets absorbed the essence of southern folk songs and combined ancient myths and legends to create. Songs of the South broke the rigid format of the Book of Songs, which was a great liberation for the development of China's ancient poetry and also opened the second spring of China's epic. "Songs of the South" adopts a sentence pattern of three to eight words, and its length and capacity can be expanded as needed. The vivid and diverse forms make Chu Ci more suitable for describing complex social life and expressing rich thoughts and feelings.
Chuci is characterized by its magnificent structure, rich imagination and flexible sentence patterns. Representative writers are Qu Yuan and Song Yu, and representative works include Li Sao and Nine Songs and Nine Chapters by Qu Yuan.
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Chu, located in the south, is a barbarian country with cultural origin and was greatly influenced by Yin Shang. When Chu Zhuangwang was in power, he was eager to expand and forge ahead in the north, and the culture of the north and the south blended, so the high ideology and culture of the Central Plains were absorbed by Chu. In the Warring States period, the confluence of North and South cultures became more obvious, as evidenced by the transplantation of The Book of Songs in the South. At that time, the monarch and ministers of Chu were up and down, and the Book of Songs was smooth. At first, this kind of transplantation was mostly used in diplomatic rhetoric, and later it penetrated into Chu literature and infected the thoughts of literati.
The works of The Book of Songs are mainly produced in the Yellow River valley in the north. Although there are some unknown literati works, most of them are four-character folk songs quenched in the Central Plains. Their writing time was roughly from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, but the poetry circle remained silent until the middle and late Warring States Period. A new style of poetry with more personality, passion and imagination, magnificent structure, novel sentence patterns and more flexibility has emerged than the works of The Book of Songs, which is the "Chu Ci" produced in the Chu area of the Yangtze River valley in the south. Qu Yuan is the founder and representative writer of Chu Ci. There are several reasons for the emergence of this new style of "Chuci".
First of all, from the artistic features of Chu Ci, it is closely related to the primitive myths of Chu and related religious activities such as witchcraft and Zhu Gong. Judging from Qu Yuan's works "Nine Songs", "Evocation of Soul" and "Tian Wen", there is a distinct brand in this respect.
Secondly, the emergence of Chu Ci is also closely related to the music and folk songs of Chu. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the music and folk songs of Chu State were called "Nanyin" or "Nanfeng".
As can be seen from the works of Chu Ci, its text system is relatively mature, especially compared with the works of The Book of Songs, a musical song of northern soil, which shows its grandeur and complexity. In addition, comparing Chu Xin's poems with The Book of Songs, apart from the above-mentioned differences in artistic forms, the most obvious differences are in sentence patterns and intonation. The works of The Book of Songs are mainly in four fonts, and the length is not large, and they are composed in the form of repeated chapters and sentences. Qu Yuan's works of Chu Ci are all long sentences, and the word "Xi" is widely used in kissing Ci, especially the latter, which almost becomes the most obvious symbol of the style of Chu Ci.