The first thing to say is, of course, the origin of classical poetry, the Book of Songs and Li Sao. The historical position of The Book of Songs must be known to many people. It is the first collection of poems in China, mostly in four-character style, with repeated chapters, that is, the difference between different paragraphs lies in the replacement of individual words. This point can be understood by thinking about the recited "Guanju" and "Picking the EU". The Book of Songs not only has a long history, but also has a great age difference between works, from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period. After careful calculation, it has actually been four or five hundred years.
As the name implies, Chu Ci is a kind of poetic style that originated in the State of Chu, and its founder is naturally Qu Yuan who angrily threw himself into the river. The style of Chu Ci is no longer limited to four words, but tends to prose. Not only that, there is also a theme, which is the title. Not in the Book of Songs. The topics we see now are all added by later generations, and many of them are taken from the first sentence of the poem. Chu ci has a wide influence. Xiang Yu's Gai Xia Ge and Liu Bang's Feng Ge both have the shadow of Chu Ci, but the space is very small, not as long as Qu Yuan's, and even Bai Juyi, who wrote a long narrative poem, can't compare with Qu Yuan.
Next is Yuefu poetry. Yuefu was originally a musical organ in the Han Dynasty. It not only composed poems praised by literati, but also returned to the folk to collect different songs, which not only examined people's feelings, but also enriched Yuefu's poems. We have come into contact with many narrative works, such as Peacock Flying Southeast about Liu Lanzhi and Jiao Zhongqing, and Mulan Poetry translated into traditional Chinese opera. Besides, Cao Cao, Bao Zhao and Bai Juyi also imitated Yuefu poems and created masterpieces handed down from generation to generation.
Ancient poems of literati. These are the foundations of Tang poetry. Since the Han Dynasty, in addition to Yuefu poems, scholars have also created five-character poems, and later developed seven-character poems. It's just that the requirements of antithesis and sentence number in poetry at this time are not as high as those in Tang poetry, and rhyme is enough. The five-character poems are represented by 19 ancient poems, and Cao San of the Three Kingdoms, Jian 'an Qizi in Jian 'an Period, Ruan Ji, Tao Yuanming and others are all representatives of ancient poems.
The next step is the peak of poetry. Tang poetry, as mentioned above, not only rhymes, but also has high requirements in the number of sentences and the neatness of antithesis. These differences in details are invisible to laymen, but they only feel that the rhyme is smooth, even if it is difficult to recite. Moreover, when I was a child, I first came into contact with simple works in Tang poetry, such as "Thinking on a Quiet Night" and "In the Lodge of the Heron". Moreover, with the development of the times, the development of Tang poetry has different contents and weather, and different schools are formed according to its style.
In fact, Song Ci had been produced in the Tang Dynasty, but it was only carried forward in the Song Dynasty. Every Song Ci basically has a fixed epigraph name, because the epigraph name of the words that need to be sung at that time is equivalent to setting the tone for the whole word, just as many people are keen to match the existing songs with different lyrics. After the epigraph, there is the title of the word, such as the well-known Niannujiao Nostalgia on Red Cliff, in which Niannujiao is the epigraph and Nostalgia on Red Cliff is the title and core of a word.
Yuanqu. Yuanqu is a new form of poetry in the Jin and Yuan Dynasties, which was born on the basis of northern folk and foreign music. It is similar to Song Ci, that is, it needs the form of title addition, but it is different in content, rhythm and tone. Comparatively speaking, Song Ci is a scholar, while Yuan Qu is a mass.
The history of the development of classical poetry, this little space is completely impossible to explain clearly, only to sort out the accumulation of thousands of years, and can it be explained clearly by simple introductions on paper?