But we all call it poetry.
So why did we call them "poems" before the Tang Dynasty, such as "Yuefu poems" and "New Yuefu poems", but after the Tang and Song Dynasties, we called some of these works "ci"? What is the origin of this? What is the difference between ancient poetry and inscriptions?
We know that poetry is homologous. So what is this "source"? Simply put, it is the lyrics. From the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period, the central music organization sent poets to collect a large number of folk poems, which were called "Feng", the poems of princes and nobles were called "Ya", and musicians made sacrificial music, which was called "Ode". This is the origin of The Book of Songs.
In the early days, poetry was an information channel for high-level rulers to understand people's livelihood and a political means to educate the rulers and the people, which was very important. Therefore, poetry is born with the temperament of the ruling class, although most of it comes from the people. This is why we read the Book of Songs today. Although it is straightforward, it is "positive".
During the Western Han Dynasty, because the development of culture was much faster than that of music, many poems could not be sung by music, and "disciple songs" appeared, and poetry gradually separated from music and became an object of singing. With the beginning of rhetoric of Cao Wei at the end of Han Dynasty, the poems of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties went to the extreme of formalism, and palace poems became more and more beautiful, but they were decadent and empty, lacking in content, and were strongly criticized by poets in the early Tang Dynasty. Poets in the Tang Dynasty inherited the poetic style and writing skills of palace-style poems, injected a high-spirited atmosphere into the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and made the poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty leap to the peak of literature.
What followed was the elegance of rhythm. Poetry has become a tool for senior literati to express their feelings and satirize and criticize, and it is getting farther and farther away from the lives of ordinary people. Poetry has gone to the high end, so who will take care of the emotional distribution of ordinary people? People can't always have big emotions, how to describe their small emotions?
Qu Zi Ci came into being. In the early days, Qu Zici was a popular work of officers and singers. In the middle Tang Dynasty, literati began to participate in the creation of ci, such as Bai Juyi's Memory of Jiangnan. This is the period when poets found a way out for poetry literature after the prosperous Tang Dynasty-because Du Li and others pushed the poems of the prosperous Tang Dynasty too high, not only we can't compare with them today, but also the poets in the middle Tang Dynasty were at a loss and broke through everywhere.
For example, Liu Yuxi developed Zhuzhi Ci from folk songs, which is a school of his own, but it is still a category of ancient poetry. After five generations of development, the epigraph that they upgraded from Qu Zi Ci became a complete and mature epigraph genre in Song Dynasty.
We can see that the genes of poetry are different.
Although poetry also comes from the people, everything can be sung. When we read the Book of Songs today, we will find that it basically covers all aspects of society. Later, all the poetic styles, whether landscape poems, pastoral poems, frontier poems and fairy poems, can be found in the Book of Songs. Therefore, we call The Book of Songs the origin of China's poems, although some ancient poems were recorded before it.
Only "painting in poetry" is a new creation, because only when a scholar painted Su Shi can he truly live in the world, and naturally there will be no works in this field in the Book of Songs.
Poetry is a work with a wide range of themes and broad feelings, and then gradually moves towards the superstructure, which is the inevitable trend of literary elegance. The origin of this word is precisely because poetry goes up and comes out to fill the emotional space of ordinary people. It has its own entertainment and feast functions since its birth. It takes the love between men and women as the theme, with gentle and charming style and low style. This is the gene of this word.
In the eyes of orthodox scholars, epigraph words used for flirting and entertainment are not literature. Even in the Northern Song Dynasty, when aphorisms were in full swing, literati never took them seriously when they wrote lyrics for entertainment at banquets.
A little inseparable from women, but it means that they despise women's social status. There is even a saying that poetry is masculine and words are feminine.
Ouyang Xiu took the lead in rectifying the style of writing and innovating poetry, but never mentioned epigrams. Compared with poetry, epigrams are inferior words, so there is absolutely no need to take care of them. Literary leaders are all like this, and everyone naturally accepts this understanding. Epilogues have always been used to express personal feelings, which are limited to parting and relationships between men and women. It is precisely because the epigraph undertakes the entertainment function that poetry completely gives up this field and becomes more and more moralized and lonely. Song poetry is getting colder and colder.
This process is called "the division of poetry". Ouyang Xiu's poems and ci have different styles. Li Qingzhao, a patriotic poet, has a graceful and feminine style, but his words are heroic and masculine, and they are entirely written by men, such as "Death is a ghost hero". This is the writing style of the whole era, not the schizophrenia of a poet. Even Su Shi, who has made great contributions to the choice of epigrams and the promotion of his status, still lacks the sense of elegance and integrity compared with his poems. Even though he consciously opened the boundaries in the theme, emotion and skills of poetry, deep down, he was still influenced by the times and retained the subtle sense of difference between words and poems.