Posted 2017/12/4
Poetry is the earliest form of Chinese literature that originated from folk songs before the written Chinese language even existed. The earliest anthology of ancient poems, Shi Jing (Book of Poetry), which is prized by scholars for its literary and historic significance, dates back to between the 11th and 6th century BC. Conventionally, Chinese poetry is divided into four classes -- shi or poetry, ci, ge or songs, and fu.
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Classification of Chinese Poetry
Chinese poetry comes in three forms:
Gushi (old poetry) is arranged in five, six or seven-syllable lines, or long and short verses. As a rule, the rhymes can be changed in almost any place -- from even to inflected tones, or vice versa. Much more liberty is permitted with the tonal order within a line, which is decided by individual temperament.
Lvshi (code verse) appeared in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and must contain two or more of so-called parallel couplets. In addition to parallelism in content there is also a phonetic parallelism or a parallelism of tones. Even tones are combined with inflected ones, and vice versa.
Jueju (curtailed verse) only has four lines of five or seven syllables, each with the least words way and a high tone. (Know more: Jueju - A Style of Chinese Poetry)
The Tang Dynasty produced a new poetic form called Ci that was written to music with strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes in fixed numbers of lines and words. Ci can be defined as "a song without a tune". Ci, which reached its greatest popularity in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), is an intricate tonal pattern to which the writer sets characters.
The third class of poetic literature is Ge (songs and poems written to folk melodies) which differs from poetry only in its musical or melodic origin. The difference between Ge and Ci is insignificant: instrumental music always accompanies Ci, but Ge was mostly vocal.
The Fu verse form is a prose poem or descriptive poem. Often it is simply a cluster of parallel couplets of varying lengths.
