Book of Songs

The Book of Songs collects 305 poems in four sections: the Guofeng, or Airs of the States, folk songs of courtship, farm labor, and the homesickness of conscripted soldiers; the Xiaoya and Daya, Minor and Major Odes performed at court banquets and ceremonies; and the Song, solemn hymns sung at ancestral sacrifice to the Zhou royal line. The poems were composed across roughly four centuries, from the early Western Zhou through the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period, drawn from both anonymous popular tradition and deliberate court composition, and reached something like their present form and selection by the 6th century BC.

Their subject matter ranges from the intimate, a woman waiting at a city gate, a wife's grief at a husband gone to war, to the grand, hymns recounting the Zhou dynasty's founding and its ancestors' virtue. Zhou aristocrats and diplomats memorized and quoted the Songs allusively in negotiation and at court, using a shared line of verse to make a point too delicate to state outright, a practice that made command of the anthology a mark of political competence as much as literary taste. Tradition credits Confucius with personally winnowing an original three thousand poems down to the surviving 305, a claim modern scholars regard as legendary, though Confucius certainly treated study of the Songs as indispensable, telling his son that a man who has not studied them "has nothing to say."

The Confucian reading that came to dominate treats the anthology as morally instructive rather than merely aesthetic: the praise and blame implicit in which songs were preserved, and how they were arranged, was thought to encode correct feeling, so that studying the Songs cultivated a reader's emotional and ethical judgment along with taste. On this basis the Book of Songs became the first of the Five Classics, its canonical status formalized when Emperor Wu of Han established doctoral chairs for each of the Five Classics in 136 BC.

Its influence on the subsequent literary tradition is difficult to overstate. It fixed a plainspoken, often concrete natural diction, birds, rivers, mulberry trees, that later poets departed from but never wholly escaped, and its practice of allusive quotation became a permanent resource of Chinese political and diplomatic rhetoric for the next two thousand years.