Ancient Chinese poetry has a long historical development process, and its genres are extremely diverse and complex; briefly, it can be divided into five major categories: Siyan, Sao style, Yuefu, ancient style, and modern style.
As for the later lyrics and music, of course they can also be included under the broad concept of "poetry", and their systems have their own characteristics. Also, in the terminology of ancient Chinese literary theory criticism, "style" sometimes refers to style. In this sense, there are various "styles" in poetry, such as Jian'an style, Yuanjia style, Xikun style, Tongguang style, etc. , all these and genre classification are completely different things. These issues need to be discussed separately.
The oldest poems are two-character poems, consisting of two words forming one sentence, such as "Dancing Song": "Broken bamboo, renewed bamboo, flying earth, chasing meat." It shows that the early people made a crude slingshot to hunt; This is a very typical two-character poem.
Two words are too simple to express the increasingly complex social life and people's emotions, so it was later expanded to four words. The works in the "Book of Songs" are basically four words, and some of them are all in four words. Those with four characters, such as "Zhou Nan·Guan Ju", "Zheng Feng·Out of the East Gate", "Xiaoya·Caiwei", etc.; there are also those that are mainly four characters with some breakthroughs, such as "Tang Feng·Cui Miao", Shi Fan Three chapters, each chapter has five sentences, of which the first four sentences are four characters and the last sentence is five characters; another example is "Binfeng July", most of the poems are four characters, but there are some five and six characters. , seven to eight words. And so on. Four-character poems were once the most popular and influential poetry style. In the Han Dynasty and later, many poets imitated the style of the Book of Songs to write four-character poems.
Monosyllabic words are often used in four-character poems, and the pause method is basically the so-called "double-syllable pause" or "two, two" style. The advantage of this is that it has a strong sense of rhythm, but its weakness is that it is relatively rigid and cannot accommodate More life content and thoughts and feelings. Therefore, after the era of The Book of Songs (from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period), excellent four-character poems were rare.
During the Warring States Period, a new style of poetry emerged in the Chu State in the south - Chu Ci. Its characteristic is that "all wrote Chu language, composed Chu sounds, recorded Chu things, and named Chu places" (Huang Bosi's "Revising Chu") "Preface", "Song Wenjian" Volume 92), has a strong local literary flavor, and also has its own characteristics in style: it is basically miscellaneous words, including mostly five-character and seven-character sentences, and mostly uses three-character sentences. Rhythm, which contains the important genes of the later "two, three" sentence pattern of five-character poems and the "two, two, three" sentence pattern of seven-character poems. The word "xi" is often used in Chu Ci - either in the middle or at the end of the sentence to help adjust the syllables and rhythm. Sometimes it can also play the role of a certain structural particle, which is very flexible and expressive; in addition, many The colloquial function words make the work have a prose tendency; the length of the work is free; and it has a title (the titles of the works in the "Book of Songs" were added by the compiler by taking certain keywords from the original poems). Since "Li Sao" is a representative work of Chu Ci, this style is called "Sao style". There are also some works in Chu Ci, such as Qu Yuan's "Heavenly Questions" and "Ode to Orange", which are still mainly four-character works and seem to be closer to the "Book of Songs", but in fact they are still different. There are some changes in the sentence structure and the pauses in the sentences. It is relatively free and also has a certain tendency of prose culture. Chu Ci is basically recited without singing. The poems used for recitation and the poems used as lyrics are always written in different ways. The so-called "Sao style" also includes the four-character type, but in more cases it refers to the miscellaneous type.
A group of Chu Ci writers who were active in the poetry world after Qu Yuan, such as Song Yu and Tang Le, further strengthened the trend of prose culture in their works, and called some works "Fu". Sima Qian mentioned them when writing a biography of Qu Yuan, saying that they were "all good at speaking and famous for their poetry" ("Historical Records: Biography of Qu Yuan"). Although the Han Fu that emerged later has a long origin, it also has an obvious inheritance relationship with the Ci and Fu of Song Yu and Tang Le. Fu is an independent style between poetry and prose, and cannot be regarded as poetry. Some people in the Han Dynasty called Qu Yuan's works Fu, which seems inappropriate now.
Many poems in the Han Dynasty were written in Sao style, such as Liu Bang's "Song of the Great Wind": "The strong wind is blowing and the clouds are flying. The powerful winds are coming to the sea and I am returning to my hometown. I am peaceful and ambitious, and I am guarding the four directions!" Another example is Zhang Heng's "Four Sorrows" The first chapter of "Poetry": "My thoughts are in Taishan. I want to follow Liang's father, but it is difficult. I turn to the east and look to the east with tears in my eyes. The beauty gave me a golden knife, how can I repay Ying Qiong Yao? The road is far away, so don't rely on Xiaoyao. , Why worry and worry!" Many works imitating Sao style were included in the book "Afterwords of Chu Ci" edited by Zhu Xi.
When writers in the Han Dynasty were keen on imitating the "Book of Songs" to write four-character poems and imitating "Chu Ci" to write Sao-style poems, many new ballads appeared among the people in various places, with sentence patterns of three, four, five and six. , all seven-character poems, with five-character and seven-character being the main ones; Yuefu poems are mostly in miscellaneous words, and the most eye-catching among them are those with five-character as the mainstream: either the first five-character or the main five-character Mixed with other sentence patterns. These folk songs were collected by the Yuefu, the agency in charge of music and literature of the central government of the Han Dynasty, compiled and processed, and spread more widely. This new poetry style was called "Song Poetry" at that time. After the Jin and Song Dynasties, it was called "Yuefu Poetry", or "Yuefu Poetry" for short.
In addition to the chapters "Bian Sao" and "Ming Poems", Liu Xie's "Wen Xin Diao Long" also has a special study on this in "Yuefu"; Xiao Tong's "Selected Works" also separately marked it among the selected poems. Yuefu category.
Characteristics of Yuefu poetry: First, it can be sung with music, but only for this reason, its chapters are called "Jie". For example, "Mo Shang Sang" is divided into three interpretations; some works have "Yan" before the main text and "Yan" after the main text. "Trend" or "chaos". "Jie", "Yan", "Tren" and "Chaos" are all terms used in music. Some of the undertones in the tunes that have no meaning are recorded in words by the organizer and mixed with the text of the lyrics, making it difficult to understand. During the performance of Yuefu poems, some formulas are sometimes added, and the lyrics are sometimes fragmented and pieced together. All these can only be understood from the perspective of music. The second is that "all are affected by sorrow and joy, and are inspired by events" ("Hanshu Yiwenzhi"). The theme is completely contemporary, the narrative is relatively prominent, and it reflects the mood of the people; the rulers of the Eastern Jin and Southern Dynasties also paid attention to collecting and preserving folk songs. , although after screening, the content is abnormally concentrated on romance, but it still has a strong folk character. Third, many mature five-character poems appeared, such as "Sang on the Moshang", "Jiangnan", "Peacock Flying Southeast" and so on. These points have had a significant impact on the poetry creation of later generations, even more powerful than the "Book of Songs" and "Chu Ci".
In addition to collecting folk songs, the Yuefu organs of the Han Dynasty also organized literati and musicians to engage in creation. Many of them were official articles used in ceremonies and had little literary value; but there were also better works, such as "Habayashi Lang" 》Just wait.
The great achievements of Yuefu folk songs attracted great attention from later literati, who imitated their thoughts and artistic expressions and created a large number of works. Regardless of whether such imitations are in music or not, and whether they use old Yuefu inscriptions or not, they are all called Yuefu poems. These literati Yuefu poems can be divided into three situations: first, they create new lyrics based on the tunes of Yuefu poems and still sing them to music, such as Cao Cao's Yuefu poems; second, they write poems using old Yuefu inscriptions, but they can no longer be used in music. For example, some Yuefu poems by Cao Zhi and Lu Ji pointed out by Liu Xie, "There are no actors, but the stories are told by silk pipes" ("Wenxin Diaolong·Yuefu"), which belong to this type; thirdly, they neither use the old Yuefu titles nor use the old Yuefu poems. Literary Yuefu poetry cannot be included in music, because this kind of poetry still retains the basic spirit of Yuefu poetry - the contemporary nature of the subject matter, the narrative nature of the texture, the popularity of the text, and the flexibility of the system - but is not influenced by traditional music. and the constraints of traditional themes, there has been greater development in literature. During the Jian'an era, there were new titles of Yuefu. Du Fu wrote many brand-new Yuefu poems. Bai Juyi and others even set off the climax of the "New Yuefu" movement. They became famous poems and no longer relied on them. They boldly intervened in politics and life, which created a new phenomenon in the history of literature. had a profound impact. When many poets wrote narrative poems on contemporary themes, they often adopted the Yuefu poetry style without hesitation. This tradition did not decline until the end of the Qing Dynasty.
Being nourished by the five-character Yuefu poems, literati in the Han Dynasty began to write five-character verses that were not musical. The earliest of them was Ban Gu's "Ode to History", and the most successful one was "Nineteen Ancient Poems" written by lower-class literati in the late Han Dynasty. . The medieval poetry world was basically dominated by five-character poetry. After the rise of modern poetry, this kind of poetry was called five-character ancient poetry, or "Five Ancient Poems" for short.
Due to the nourishment of folk seven-character ballads and Sao style, seven-character poetry later appeared. The earliest seven-character poem by literati that has been circulated to this day is Cao Pi's "Yan Ge Xing". After the rise of modern poetry, this kind of poetry was called seven-character ancient poetry, or "Qigu" for short.
Ancient style poems are of any length, they can be as few as four sentences, or they can be very long; they do not pay attention to antithesis or meter, and their rhymes are flexible and can be changed. Guti is ancient free-style poetry. There have been people in all dynasties who have been engaged in the Five Ancients and the Seven Ancients, and have produced a large number of famous works.
The Five Ancients and the Seven Ancients are the mainstream of ancient poetry. In addition, there are also ancient poetry in miscellaneous words. Ancient miscellaneous poems are mostly seven-character poems, and have absorbed some nutrients from Yuefu poems, so they show some marginality; generally speaking, the miscellaneous poems before the Tang Dynasty belong to the Yuefu poems, and the miscellaneous poems after the Tang Dynasty are mainly seven-character poems. It is called "Ge Xing" and can be regarded as a variant of the Qixing style. For example, Li Bai's "Sleepwalking Tianmu Yin Leaving Farewell" and Du Fu's "Song of the Thatched Cottage Broken by the Autumn Wind" are masterpieces in the style of Ge Xing.
The so-called modern poetry is relative to the ancient poetry. Ancient Chinese poetry was originally closely related to music. Both the Book of Songs and Yuefu Poems could be sung. However, later on, poetry gradually became separated from music. At this time, we need to pay attention to the musical beauty of poetry. If we want people to remember it, we have to combine it with music. Think of something else besides the rhythm. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, poets such as Cao Zhi and Lu Ji have made valuable explorations in this area; during the Yongming Dynasty of the Southern Qi Dynasty, a group of scholars and writers led by Shen Yue finally realized the characteristics of Chinese characters after arduous research The pronunciation is divided into four tones: Ping, Shang, Qu and Ru. When writing poems, these characters with different tones must be arranged reasonably. "If there is a floating tone in the front, it must be cut in the back. Within one bamboo slip, the pronunciation and rhyme are all different, and two sentences Among them, the importance and importance are all different" (Shen Yue's "Book of Song·Xie Lingyun Biography"). In order to achieve this state of mind, it is necessary to avoid various problems caused by improper matching. The "voice diseases" they proposed include the following eight types: flat head, upper tail, wasp waist, crane knee, big rhyme, small rhyme, and straight button. , Pang Niu. In order to strive for the musical beauty of poetry, they made all kinds of cumbersome and harsh regulations. As a result, even they themselves could not fully achieve it.
At that time, a group of poets used new theoretical knowledge to write poems, which were called "Yongming style" and later also called "Qiliang style" or "New style poetry". The new style created by Yongming poets has been continuously improved through the efforts of many poets. In the early Tang Dynasty, Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen paid attention to rhythm and antithesis, and considered the whole text (rather than just two sentences like the Yongming poets). ) The harmonious new poetry style was finally formally established, called "regular poetry", also called "modern poetry"; from then on, the poetry that did not pay attention to rhythm in the past was accordingly called ancient poetry.
The greatest contribution of the modern poetry that was established in the early Tang Dynasty was to classify the three tones of Shang, Lai and Ru into one type (oblique tones), which formed a binary opposition to the flat tones. In this way, the emphasis on rhythm was simplified into two tones: antithetical and oblique tones. With reasonable arrangements, the relevant rules will be more concise, reasonable and easy to implement. This rule is still popular in the writing of old-style poetry (compared to the new poetry produced after the May Fourth Movement, all ancient poetry styles are old-style).
The most important rule of modern poetry is that you can only rhyme with flat tones from one rhyme to the next, and pay attention to the tone at the pauses in the poem - the second and fourth characters of the five-character poem, and the second, fourth and sixth character of the seven-character poem. The equal and oblique: the same sentence should be equal and oblique, and the two dual sentences should be equal and oblique relative to each other (if they are the same, they will commit the problem of "mismatching"), and the two adjacent sentences that are not dual (the couplet in the upper couplet is the previous sentence) and the sentence in the second line (i.e., the next sentence) should be identical (if they are different, it will cause "loss of cohesion"). For example, the first four sentences of a five-character poem can be arranged like this:
仄仄平仄, 平平仄仄平.
Ping, Ping, Ping, Ping, Ping, Ping.
The rest can be deduced in this way. Seven-character rhymed poetry is equivalent to adding two words with opposite tones before each line of a five-character rhymed poem. For example, adding two characters with a flat tone to the five-character "廄廄平平廄" becomes "平平廄仄平平廄", so etc. Therefore, if you master the five-character rhythm, you will also master the seven-character rhythm.
The rhythmic poetry also stipulates that the third and fourth sentences and the fifth and sixth sentences must pay attention to antithesis and form two couplets. The first two sentences and the seventh and eighth sentences do not necessarily have to be in opposition, but for the convenience of reference, they are also called couplets. So a rhythmic poem has four couplets: the first couplet, the chin couplet, the neck couplet, and the tail couplet.
The rhythmic poetry is limited to eight lines (it can be lengthened under special circumstances). Half of the rhythmic poetry is used to form a four-line poem called quatrain. There are five quatrains and seven quatrains. Poems with four lines to one line have existed since ancient times. Those that do not pay attention to meter are called "ancient poems" and belong to ancient style poems, which are different from the "lujue" poems that belong to modern style poems.
There are various rules for modern poetry. Those who are interested can find special books to learn and research. Here are just a few of the most basic ones.
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