On the Time When "Modern Style" Poetry Came into Being

In the past,people talking about the origin and the development of modern style poetry made no distinction between poems with five characters in each line and those with seven characters in each line,and they were generally considered to have appeared at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty,or originated in the Tang Dynasty.Based on the further analyses of the forms,the tonal patterns,the violation against the tonal patterns and the corresponding remedies(拗救),the rhyme,and the matching of both sound and sense in two lines(对仗) in new style poetry in the Six Dynasties(with the emphasis on new style poetry with five characters in each line),this paper comes to the following conclusions: modern style poems with five characters in each line and those with seven characters in each line don't come into being at the same time and receive equal development.Modern style poems with five characters came into being in the Six Dynasties,while modern style poems with seven characters in each line were in the embryonic stage in the Chen Dynasty(one of the Six Dynasties) and the Sui Dynasty,and came into their own in the Tang Dynasty.New style poems of four lines,each containing five characters with oblique rhyme(仄韵) also came into being in the Six Dynasties,which is the beginning of modern style poems of its kind in the Tang Dynasty.