Art songs originated in Germany in the 19th century, and it was at that time that art songs laid the basic tone of integrating poetry and music. The moment art songs were spread to China, poetry and music were endowed with the mysterious verve of East. The first Chinese art song Da Jiang Dong Qu was composed by Qing Zhu in 1920. From the very beginning, composers took into consideration the two focuses amid the creation of Chinese art songs, one of which is to learn the technique of expression of Western art songs, and the other one of which is to further enable the art songs to show the national temperament, language and feeling of China. By integrating the two, Chinese art songs can have their own techniques of expression. Benefiting by the musical symbols and national poetics peculiar to China, a great number of art songs with high artistic value have emerged in China.

In addition, with a long history, Chinese poetry can be classified into different types no matter according to age, genre or other perspectives. As the lyric and music of art songs are closely related to each other, this paper will expound the definition of Chinese art songs and analyze Chinese art songs from the perspective of the classification of Chinese poetics.

This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is about an overview of Chinese art songs. Chinese art songs developed rapidly in a period of time in the past with various works emerging in succession, however, it was also in this period of time that other genres that do not belong to art songs were also generally included in Chinese art songs, causing the original concept to become fuzzy. As a consequence, based on the existing academic viewpoints, this paper will discuss the relatively accurate definition of Chinese art songs. Chapter 2 is about the art songs under the classification of poetics, which first expounds different classifications of poetics and further classifies different art songs from the perspective of the classification of poetics. As the main part of the paper, Chapter 3 to Chapter 5 mainly set forth the association between poetry and Chinese art songs from three aspects, namely, rhythm melody and poetry rhythm, musical structure and poetry image, as well as the tonality and poetry expression. In addition, the aesthetic and singing of Chinese art songs are discussed at the end of Chapter 5 from singers’ point of view, and suggestions on how to singing Chinese poetry art songs emerging in different periods or with different genres are put forward for performers’ reference.