The Functional Relationship Between The Pleasantness Value and the Character-number of the Chinese Classical Poem

The present study properly belonging to the field of experimental esthetics or that of so-called meta-literary; criticism(3,6) was designed to test the hypothesis that there is a functional relationship between the pleasantness value and the character-number (the number of characters per line) of the Chinese classical poem. The history of Chinese poetry(1,5) records that the Chinese classical poem appeared first in the Book of Odes (詩經) and the Metrical Compositions of Ch'u (楚辭) about two thousand years ago. In the former, the character-numbers range from 2 to 8, but the most prevailing number is 4; in the latter, the character-numbers range from 2 to 4 mixed with particles (虛字), but the most prevailing number is 3. The poems written in the style of the Tunes Collection (樂府) originated in the Former Han Dynasty (B. C. 206-32).