Su Shi has high attainments in literature and poetry, and can be called the representative of the highest literary achievement in Song Dynasty. Moreover, Su Shi's creative activities are not limited to literature. He has made outstanding achievements in calligraphy, painting and other fields, and also made contributions in medicine, cooking, water conservancy and other skills. Su Shi is a typical representative of the cultural spirit in Song Dynasty. Judging from the scope of literary history, Su Shi's significance mainly has two points: First, Su Shi's attitude towards life has become a paradigm respected by later scholars: advancing and retreating freely, not being shocked by humiliation. Because Su Shi integrated the two attitudes of feudal scholars on the same value scale, he was able to keep calm and go all out. Of course, this paradigm is more suitable for scholars who have suffered from ups and downs, and it can lead to a life of integrity and abundance, which is exactly what scholars in the past dynasties after the Song Dynasty hoped to do. Secondly, Su Shi's aesthetic attitude provides an enlightening aesthetic paradigm for later generations. He embraces the world with a broad aesthetic vision, so everything is considerable and beauty is everywhere. This paradigm has opened up a new world for future generations in subject matter, content and expression. Therefore, it is a historical necessity that Su Shi is universally loved by later literati.
Su Shi enjoyed a high reputation in the literary world at that time. He inherited Ouyang Xiu's spirit and attached great importance to discovering and cultivating literary talents. At that time, there were many young writers around him. Among them, Huang Tingjian, Zhang Lei, Chao Cuo Zhi and Qin Guan are collectively called "Su Men Four Bachelor's Degree". Together with Chen Shidao and Li Zhi, they are called "Six Gentlemen of Sumen". In addition, Li, Li Zhiyi, Tang Geng, Zhang Shunmin, Kong, He Zhu and others were also directly or indirectly influenced by Su Shi. Su Shi's achievements include all kinds of literary styles, and his own creation has no fixed norms to follow, so Su Men writers present different faces in their creation. Huang Tingjian is good at poetry, Qin Guan is good at ci, Li Zhi is good at classical Chinese, and Zhang and Chao are good at poetry. At the same time, their artistic styles also have their own personalities. For example, Huang's poems are innovative, Chen's poems are simple, and their styles are not good. Later, Huang and Chen also opened another school.
Su Shi's works were very famous at that time and were very popular in Liao countries, North Korea and other places. At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, the court once banned the circulation of Su Shi's works, but the stricter the ban, the wider it spread. By the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, Su Shi's collected works were widely circulated with various versions, and were repeatedly engraved in later dynasties.
In the eyes of later scholars, Su Shi is a brilliant literary master, and people compete to learn nutrition from Su Shi's works. In the era of confrontation between Jin State and Southern Song Dynasty, Su Shi had a far-reaching influence on both the north and the south. Su Shi's poems not only influenced the poems and songs of the Song Dynasty, but also inspired the poets of the Ming Dynasty and the Song Dynasty in the early Qing Dynasty. Su Shi's spirit of liberating ci style was directly inherited by the new poets in the Southern Song Dynasty, forming a bold ci school on an equal footing with graceful ci, and its influence has been spread to people in the Qing Dynasty. Su Shi's prose, especially his essays, is the artistic source of the unique spirit of the prose of the police school in Ming Dynasty. Until the Qing Dynasty, the influence of Su Wen could still be seen in the prose of Yuan Mei and Zheng Xie.
Su Shi's amiable and humorous image remained in the minds of ordinary people in later generations. His travels around the world and his life inventions are all topics talked about by later generations. Among the writers in the Song Dynasty, Su Shi is unparalleled in terms of the degree of being widely loved by later generations.