It is also a rich source of chengyu (four-character classical idioms) that are still a part of learned discourse and even everyday language in modern Chinese.

The Odes first became known as a jīng, or a "classic book", in the canonical sense, as part of the Han dynasty's official adoption of Confucianism as the guiding principle of Chinese society.

[1] In English, lacking an exact equivalent for the Chinese, the translation of the word shi in this regard is generally as "poem", "song", or "ode".

[1] The majority of the Odes date to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), and were drawn from around provinces and cities in the Zhongyuan (Central Plains) area.

[3][4] According to the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan, the latest material in the Shijing was the song "Tree-Stump Grove" (株林) in the "Odes of Chen", dated to the middle of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 700 BCE).

[8] The "Airs of the States" are shorter lyrics in simple language that are generally ancient folk songs which record the voice of the common people.

[8] They often speak of love and courtship, longing for an absent lover, soldiers on campaign, farming and housework, and political satire and protest.

於穆清廟 肅雝顯相 濟濟多士 秉文之德 對越在天 駿奔走在廟 不顯不承 無射於人斯 Whether the various Shijing poems were folk songs or not, they "all seem to have passed through the hands of men of letters at the royal Zhou court".

[8] Lines tend to occur in syntactically related couplets, with occasional parallelism, and longer poems are generally divided into similarly structured stanzas.

The works in the Classic of Poetry vary in their lyrical qualities, which relates to the musical accompaniment with which they were in their early days performed.

The songs from the "Hymns" and "Eulogies", which are the oldest material in the Poetry, were performed to slow, heavy accompaniment from bells, drums, and stone chimes.

The poems of the Classic of Poetry tend to have certain typical patterns in both rhyme and rhythm, to make much use of imagery, often derived from nature.

Although the Shijing does not specify the names of authors in association with the contained works, both traditional commentaries and modern scholarship have put forth hypotheses on authorship.

The "Golden Coffer" chapter of the Book of Documents says that the poem "Owl" (鴟鴞) in the "Odes of Bin" was written by the Duke of Zhou.

The repeated emphasis on female authorship of poetry in the Shijing was made much of in the process of attempting to give the poems of the women poets of the Ming-Qing period canonical status.

Out of these many collected pieces, also according to tradition, Confucius made a final editorial round of decisions for elimination or inclusion in the received version of the Poetry.

In 2015, the Anhui University purchased a group of looted manuscripts, among which is one of the oldest extant scribal copies of the Classic of Poetry (at least part of it).

[26] The people's folksongs were deemed to be the best gauge of their feelings and conditions, and thus indicative of whether the nobility was ruling according to the mandate of Heaven or not.

[29] This view is now generally discredited, as the Zuo zhuan records that the Classic of Poetry already existed in a definitive form when Confucius was just a young child.

However the discovery of pre-Qin copies showing the same variation as Han texts, as well as evidence of Qin patronage of the Poetry, have led modern scholars to doubt this account.

[33] Xu Shen's influential dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, written in the 2nd-century CE, quotes almost exclusively from the Mao Poetry.

[34] The Book of Odes has been a revered Confucian classic since the Han dynasty, and has been studied and memorized by centuries of scholars in China.

The extensive allegorical traditions associated with the Odes were theorized by Herbert Giles to have begun in the Warring States period as a justification for Confucius' focus upon such a seemingly simple and ordinary collection of verses.

[37] These elaborate, far-fetched interpretations seem to have gone completely unquestioned until the 12th century, when scholar Zheng Qiao (鄭樵, 1104–1162) first wrote his scepticism of them.

[41] The Legalists, on their side, attempted to suppress the Shijing by violence, after the Legalist philosophy was endorsed by the Qin dynasty, prior to their final triumph over the neighboring states: the suppression of Confucian and other thought and literature after the Qin victories and the start of Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars era, starting in 213 BCE, extended to attempt to prohibit the Shijing.

Wang refers to the account of King Wu's victory over the Shang dynasty in the "Major Court Hymns" as the "Weniad" (a name that parallels The Iliad), seeing it as part of a greater narrative discourse in China that extols the virtues of wén (文 "literature, culture") over more military interests.