On the Development of Xia, Shang and Zhou Poetry

There are two main literary forms in prehistoric legend period: folk songs and myths. Most ancient songs have been lost. Although there are records in ancient books from time to time, such as Song of Beating the Earth, Ballad of Kangqu, Song of Qingyun, Song of La, Song of Nanfeng, etc. Obviously, as far as its ideological content and expression are concerned, most of them are under the guise of future generations. Only a few people have more or less preserved their original form. For example, the following song "Play a Song":

Broken bamboo, continued bamboo, flying soil, chasing far away. (Zhao Ye's "Wu Yue Chun Qiu" Volume 9 in the Eastern Han Dynasty)

Another example is the pastoral poetry contained in Yi Gui Shang Mei Liu:

Women's basketball, unrealistic;

When the sheep was cut, there was no blood.

Another example is a "La Ci" contained in the Book of Rites, Suburb Sacrifice:

Earth, go back to your house! Water belongs to its valley!

Insect, don't do it Vegetation, return to its ze!

Ancient ballads have some characteristics: First, their contents are mostly related to people's working life or religious activities at that time. Second, the length and sentence patterns are short, and the rhythm and rhythm are simple.

For the Xia Dynasty and the early Shang Dynasty, where systematic characters have not been found so far, people's knowledge and understanding are still extremely poor, and there are many gaps, which are far from coherent and clear, and the literary situation in this period is also vague.

When Chinese characters came into being is still an unsolved problem, but before the discovery of new underground cultural relics, it can be judged that the oldest are the inscriptions on Oracle Bone Inscriptions and bronzes produced in the middle of Shang Dynasty. At that time, the face of China literature gradually became clear.

The preserved documents of Shang Dynasty mainly include Oracle Bone Inscriptions, some hexagrams in Zhouyi and Pan Geng in Shangshu.

An important feature of Shang culture is respect for primitive religions. It can be said that the atmosphere of primitive witchcraft religion hung over the Shang Dynasty, and the authority of ghosts and gods was supreme. Just as the Book of Rites said, "Yin people respected gods, led civil gods, and ghosts first followed rituals." At that time, there were two kinds of professionals specializing in religious activities: wizards and historians. The documents of Shang Dynasty were written by these two kinds of clergy, and the concept of respecting ghosts and gods runs through these documents.

Some hexagrams in Zhouyi originated from Shang Dynasty and were also made for divination and witchcraft activities. Different from Oracle bone inscriptions, they are not instant Oracle bones, but a collection of divinatory symbols that have been circulating for a long time and are considered to be effective. Generally, paragraphs are much longer, mostly rhyming ballads, rich in content, and often use contrast, symbolism and repetition, so they can be regarded as the bud of China's poetry.

There is a part of Shangshu in Shangshu, and the legend is a document of Shang Dynasty, but only Pan Geng can be trusted. This is the motto published by Shang King Pan Geng when he decided to move the capital to Yin. Its length is quite complete. Although the text is ancient and difficult, you can still feel the tone and feelings of the speaker. Some vivid metaphors are used in this paper, such as "if you watch its fire", "if the network is in the key, it is orderly" and "the fire is in the original". These metaphors were later transformed into some idioms, which are still in use today. It should be said that Pan Geng is literary.

During the Spring and Autumn Period, there were great changes in culture compared with the past, that is, the rise of rational spirit. Since Duke Zhou's "ritual and music system" in the early Western Zhou Dynasty, the witchcraft religious culture in Xia and Shang Dynasties began to disintegrate, and the concept of respecting morality gradually replaced the concept of respecting ghosts and gods. When Confucius advocated "self-denial and courtesy" and declared "Machamp Rebellion", the rational culture marked by "rites and music" was more deeply rooted in people's hearts. Compared with the past, literature in this period paid more attention to life, society and history, and paid more attention to expressing people's thoughts and feelings and expressing human activities.

There were two literary forms in this period: poetry and prose. In terms of poetry, China's first poetry collection, The Book of Songs, appeared. It collected 305 poems from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period, among which only a few works produced in the early period still had certain religious color, and most of them abandoned the content of witchcraft religion and became the main expression of people's lives and emotions in reality. The Book of Songs has a broad theme, sincere feelings, diverse techniques, beautiful rhythm and vivid language, which laid the aesthetic spirit and fine tradition of China's ancient poetry and had a great and far-reaching impact on later generations.

Prose in this period mainly includes Zhou Shu in Shangshu, Chronological History Book Chunqiu, Analects of Confucius, Mozi and Laozi.

The situation of "a hundred schools of thought contend" in the field of ideology and culture during the Warring States period contributed to the unprecedented prosperity of literature and art, and the most prominent achievement was prose. Prose can be divided into historical prose and various schools of thought prose. Representative works of historical prose include Zuo Zhuan, Mandarin and Warring States Policy. Hundred schools of thought's representative works are Mencius and Zhuangzi.

At the end of the Warring States Period, a great poet Qu Yuan appeared in Chu State, who lit up the silent poetry world with his brilliant creation. He was a patriot who actively advocated a beautiful political ideal, but he was exiled and could not serve the country, so he devoted himself to poetry creation with great anxiety and indignation. He opened up a new world of Chu Ci literature. With the help of freer poetic style and magnificent rhetoric, his works expressed his will to devote himself to the motherland and showed noble personality by using myths and legends and imaginative ideas, which became the peak of poetry in the pre-Qin era and the Book of Songs.

According to the careful textual research of Wei Yuan, Pi, Wang Guowei and others, it is considered that Song of Shang Jun is a work in the Spring and Autumn Period, which originated in Shangqiu, the capital of Song Dynasty. Lu Kanru and Feng's History of Poetry called Ode to Shang "copying and copying", which can be called annotation.