Poetry with Seven Characters in a Line Did Not Originate from the Mode of Poetry of Chu ——Proceeding from the comparison between Song of Harmony·Today There Are People and The Nine Songs·The Spirit of the Mountains

It has been an opinion of the majority in the modern academic circles that poetry with seven characters in a line originated from the mode of Poetry of Chu. An important material is that Shen Yue's History of Song·Records of Music recorded the poem Today There Are People, which was adapted from The Nine Songs·The Spirit of the Mountains. But the relationship between the two poems should not be seen as the evolution of the two modes. The mode of Poetry of Chu and poetry with seven characters in a line were two different modes of poetry in essence. The latter could not have been evolved from the former. The mode of Poetry of Chu developed in two directions, with one keeping up with its existence in such two forms as of songs of Chu and of descriptive prose interspersed with verse in the style of Li Sao and with the other changed into six-character pattern in the descriptive prose with no verse. Nevertheless, poetry with seven characters in a line came into being with its own independent course. In the history of literature, it was a natural matter for the various literary forms in their process of formation to be influenced by other forms. Fiction and drama, poetry and ci ( poetry written to certain tunes with strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes in fixed numbers of lines and words ), ci and qu (verse for singing) all had relations of mutual influence. Nevertheless, in doing research on influencing between literary forms, it is imperative not only to compare the similarities and differences in the superficial forms between the two , but also pay attention to the essential features between the various literary forms.