A Reinterpretation of the Origin of the Seven-character-in-a-line Poetry

In history of Chinese literature,there have been quite a few controversies over seven-character-in-a-line poetry.As for its origin,there have been two different schools since Ming Dynasty;one holds that it originated from the accents and songs of Chu,while other maintains that it comes from the ordinary ballads.Through a careful study of ballads in Twenty-Five Histories,this paper concludes that seven-character-in-a-line poetry did not originate from the accents and songs of Chu due to their different sentence patterns and cultural backgrounds but from ballads,mainly from folk songs in north China whose sentences do not have character of Xi.