The Shih-Ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics

The Shih-Ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics

It is inevitable that the searchlight for the beginnings of Chinese poetry should focus on the Shih Ching, or Book of Songs. And since poetry marks the beginning of the creative literature of any nation, it is the concern of literary history to seek in the Songs such embryonic features as may typify much of later Chinese literary genres, in so far as they can be said to have a ''national character''. If one pauses to ask the question, in very general terms, of readers who are conscious of other literatures as well, what would be the most striking quality of Chinese literature in their impression, one of the possible answers might be that it is the combination or fusion of technical niceties, high sophistication and refinement of sensibilities with keen, direct, simple and perhaps sometimes naive observations of man and nature in this temporal world.