China's poems originated from rhythmic songs such as weightlifting and persuasion issued by ancient ancestors in their labor. For example, there are folk songs such as "broken bamboo", "continued bamboo", "flying soil" and "chasing meat" in "Wu Yue Chun Qiu", which is said to be a poem in the ancient Yanhuang period, and its content records people's labor scenes at that time.

With the development of social history, during the 500 years from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (BC 1 1 century to the 7th century BC), China's ancient poetry has made remarkable achievements. The Book of Songs, produced in this historical period, contains 305 poems, which is the oldest collection of poems in the history of China literature.

The Book of Songs is divided into three categories: wind, elegance and ode. Wind is a folk song with local color in fifteen vassal States at that time; Ya is a music song in the area directly ruled by Zhou Dynasty. "Fu" is a dance music used in ancestral halls, also called temple music.

Western poetry came into being in the late bronze age of ancient Greece. Ancient folklore, heroic songs and fairy tales originated from the disintegration of clan society. According to legend, Homer, a blind poet in ancient Greece, based on this, compiled Homer's Epic, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. The content includes the social situation from 1 1 century to the 9th century BC and the Mycenae civilization before 2000. It mainly praises the heroic achievements of tribes and nations in the process of formation and development, including the difficulties and obstacles of primitive people in creating history, the struggle against foreign aggression, and other major themes related to the fate of the country and the nation. Become the oldest literary work in the history of European literature.