Everything about Shi Poetry totally explained
Shi (詩) is the
Chinese word for "
poetry" or "poem". It can be used as an umbrella term to mean
Chinese poetry in any form, including
ci and
qu, but it's most commonly used to refer to the classical form of poetry which reached its zenith in the
Tang Dynasty. To distinguish the classical form from the
vers libre developed in the 20th century, the former is known as
jiushi (舊詩 "old poetry", not to be confused with
gushi 古詩) and the latter
xinshi (新詩 "new poetry", not to be confused with
jintishi 近體詩).
Origins
Shi Jing (詩經 "Classic of Poetry") was the first major collection of Chinese poems, collecting both aristocratic poems (the "Odes") and more rustic poems, probably derived from folksongs (the "Songs"). They are mostly composed of four-character (四言) lines.
A second, more lyrical and romantic anthology was
Chu Ci (楚辭 "Songs of Chu"), made up primarily of poems ascribed to
Qu Yuan and his follower
Song Yu. These poems are composed of lines of irregular lengths.
From the
Han Dynasty onwards, a process similar to the origins of
Shi Jing produced the
yue fu (樂府 "Music Bureau") poems. Many of them are composed of lines of five-character (五言) or seven-character (七言) poems. These two forms were to dominate Chinese poetry until the modern era. They are divided into the original
gushi (old poems) and
jintishi. The latter is a stricter form developed in the early Tang Dynasty with rules governing the structure of a poem. The greatest writers of
gushi and
jintishi are often held to be
Li Bai and
Du Fu respectively.
Gushi
The term
gushi (古詩 "old poetry") can refer either to the first, mostly anonymous
shi poems, or more generally to the poems written in the same form by later poets.
Gushi in this latter sense are defined essentially by what they're not: for example, they're not
jintishi (regulated verse). The writer of
gushi was under no formal constraints other than line length and
rhyme (in every second line). The form was therefore favoured for
narrative works and by writers seeking a relaxed or imaginative style; Li Bai is the most prominent of these, but most major poets wrote significant
gushi.
Jintishi
Jintishi (近體詩 "modern-form poetry"), or
regulated verse developed from the
5th century onwards. By the Tang Dynasty, a series of set
tonal patterns had been developed, which were intended to ensure a balance between the
four tones of
classical Chinese in each
couplet: the level tone, and the three deflected tones (rising, falling and entering). The Tang Dynasty was the high point of the
jintishi.
Wang Wei and
Cui Hao were notable pioneers of the form, while
Du Fu was its most accomplished exponent.
The basic form of
jintishi is
lüshi (律詩), with eight lines. In addition to the tonal constraints, this form required parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets. The lines in these couplets had to contain contrasting content, with the characters in each line usually in the same
part of speech.
Another form is the
jueju (絕句), or quatrain which followed the tonal pattern of the first four lines of the
lüshi. This form doesn't require parallelism.
The last form is
pailü (排律), which extended
lǜshi to unlimited length by repeating the tonal pattern and the required parallelism of the second and third couplets. Parallelism isn't required for the first and the last couplets.
All forms of
jintishi could be written in five- or seven- character lines. The six character-line form (六言) can be seen occasionally, but isn't common. The rules on tones and parallelism are not strictly followed in all cases: when classifying poems as
gushi or
jintishi, commentators traditionally placed greater emphasis on following the tonal rules than on parallelism.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Shi Poetry'.
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