The Book of Songs is the first collection of realistic poems in China, which collected 3 1 1 poems from the early Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period.
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.
Value impact:
Social function:
The compilation of The Book of Songs in the Spring and Autumn Period was mainly for application:
First, as a teaching material for learning music and reciting poems; Secondly, as a ritual song for feasting and offering sacrifices; Thirdly, it can be used as a tool to express one's feelings in diplomatic occasions or speech responses.
The diplomatic communication through poetry in the Spring and Autumn Period was very extensive, which made The Book of Songs a very important tool at that time. There are many records about this in Zuo Zhuan, such as poems satirizing the other side (twenty-seven years as "xianggong"), poems being laughed at because they didn't understand the other side's meaning (twenty years as Zhao Gong), poems in which a small country turned to a big country for help (thirteen years as Wen Gong) and so on.
These quotations from The Book of Songs, or exhortations, or comments, or analysis, or expressions, have their own functions, but they have one thing in common, that is, all the quoted poems are "taken out of context"-take one or two of them, regardless of the meaning of the whole article. This phenomenon was called "commonplace" in the Spring and Autumn Period. In other words, at that time, the function of The Book of Songs was not in itself, but in "expressing ambition through poetry".
If you want to express your ambition, you can quote a poem. Poetry serves the ambition, not what the original intention of the poem is, but whether the quoted content can explain the ambition. This is a true application of The Book of Songs in the Spring and Autumn Period, but its literary function has been misinterpreted.