Pop Songs and Classical Chinese Poetry

It is a unique scene in the current singer circle that classical poems and verses are entering into pop songs, a phenomenon that provides us a good cut-in point to scrutinize the relationship between poems and songs. There are three chief types for classical poems and verses entering into modern songs, namely, revivification, popularization, and synthesis. Classical poems and verses that may enter into pop songs are not decided by their status in the Chinese literature history; rather, the commonality of emotion ancient and today, and the representation forms that merge classical and modern factors, have peculiar significance. So it is not appropriate to judge song verses by the criteria for poems and verses, but by their dual characteristics, i.e. both for poem and song. The fact that classical poems and verses entering into modern pop songs does not mean that the trend would lead to the birth of a new poetic style. In fact, songs have already shaken off their attaching status to literature, and recovered to their own. This is the inherent reason why poems and songs have alternatively seen each of their days in the past twenty years.