ABSTRACT
The earliest extant commentaries on China's first anthology of poetry, the Shi Jing or Classic of Poetry, frequently label as xing opening lines of some of the poems. The earliest poems of the Shi Jing, or Classic of Poetry, were composed as long ago as the twelfth century BCE and were probably first edited in the fifth or sixth centuries BCE, even if the traditional belief that Confucius gathered the poems is probably spurious. The Confucian commentaries to the Classic of Poetry have been even more influential than the poems themselves. Typically, the poems of the Classic of Poetry are far less circumspect about sexual desire than either the Confucian commentaries attached to them, or practically the entirety of the Chinese poetic tradition. The lecturer disappeared from American movie houses by 1910, replaced by editing techniques that imposed a different sort of silent narrative voice on the images, but persisted in Japan until the 1930s.
