Many Chinese characters are pictographs, thus making Chinese ancient poesy full of visualization. For example, American poet Ezra Pound thought that Chinese character Chun ( , spring) was just like a sun ( ) under thriving grass and forests. Therefore, poems made of Chinese characters are just like different sets of vivid pictures, guiding readers to enter the bourn described in the poems.

Chinese characters have significant effects on the styles of Chinese poems and the major effects are as follows:

1.Lines of the Same Length in Poems

Most Chinese ancient poems employ lines with the same number of characters except Ci and Qu. For instance, poems in Shi Jing (The Book of Odes) are mostly four-character lines and poems in Chu Ci (Songs of Chu), six-character lines with an auxiliary word Xi ( ) at the end. Most old-style and modern-style poems comprise of five-character or seven-character lines.

2.  Level and Oblique Tones and Antithesis

Modern-style poems, Ci and Qu feature strict level and oblique tones and antithesis, i.e. characters in certain places of the lines should have level tones and characters in some other places should have oblique tones; and two lines in a poem should match each other in both sound and sense.

3. Words and Syntax

Each character is basically an independent morpheme with pronunciation and meaning. A lot of characters have several meanings each and their ways of word organization vary a lot. Therefore, the flowery language used in poems is quite complicated and has different styles. As for syntax, because the Chinese language lacks flexibility in configuration and structures and each character is relatively independent, many ancient poems break up two characters of a word or move certain characters forward in a poetic line.