Why was poetry important to Tang and Song dynasties?
The Song and Tang period is marked by a revival of old Confucian traditions after the Tang age of Buddhism, and the prevailing position of civil scholars over the military age of Tang and Five Dynasties. But Song culture was also a culmination of the heritage of two thousand years of culture, and from this point of crystallization on, Chinese thinking became orthodox, culture became sterile as if it had been unchanged since thousands of years. Poetry played a very important role in Chinese literature throughout the ages. The two most popular patterns of Chinese poetry of these dynasties are shi poetry and ci poetry. The first was the regular style of poetry (lüshi ) that matured under Tang but was still in use in the 20th century. It is characterized by equally long verses with 5 or 7, sometimes 6 syllables that bear end rhymes in the 2nd and 4th verse. Often shi poems are very short with only 4 or 8 lines (1 or 2 stanzas) and are then called jueju “terminated sentences”. The other typ
