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What is Jintishi?
Jintishi (近體詩) literally means "modern-style poetry" in Chinese. Actually, Jintishi is nothing modern at all. In fact, its origin could be traced as far back as the Six Dynasties (222-589 A.D.) when Shen Yue (沈約) and ZhouYong (周顒) first outlined the rules governing the tone and rhythm of Chinese characters. However, it was not until the Tang Dynasty that Jintishi was fully developed and adopted as a popular poetic form in Chinese classical poetry.
The term Jintishi was originally used to distinguish this type of poetic form from gutishi (古體詩), the ancient-style poetry. In contrast to gushi, which is under no constraints in terms of ping ze (alternating level and deflected tones), jintishi must adhere to a certain tonal pattern, rhyme scheme, and parallelism. The two basic forms of jintishi are lüshi (律詩) or "regulated verse", and jueju (絕句) or "truncated verse".
Lüshi takes the following two forms:
Wulü (五律): an eight-line regulated poem with five characters to a line. Qilü (七律): an eight-line regulated poem with seven characters to a line.
Jueju takes the following two forms:
Wujue (五絕): a four-line truncated poem with five characters to a line. Qijue (七絕): a four-line truncated poem with seven characters to a line.
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