There are also some new trends in artistic style and expression in Song poetry.
first of all, it is argumentative. Du Fu and Han Yu in the Tang Dynasty had this symptom. By the Song Dynasty, with the continuous expansion of the function and expressive force of poetry and the increasing social contradictions, coupled with the fact that most poets in the Song Dynasty were integrated with politicians and bureaucrats, it has become a historical necessity for them to "talk about current affairs and argue for splendor" (Ouyang Xiu's Reading in Zhenyang)-using poetry as a weapon, discussing current disadvantages and interfering in politics. The prevailing Zen Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty further aggravated this trend. Since Wang Anshi and Su Shi in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, most poets like to talk about Zen, so it became a common practice at that time to discuss poetry with Zen, to integrate Zen into poetry, and to exert Zen theory in poetry. Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty stifled the aesthetic value of literature and people's normal feelings, which played a huge role in the development of poetry. As for moving the cliches of Neo-Confucianism into poetry creation, it also produced a lot of trite arguments full of headscarves. As Liu Kezhuang commented in the Preface to Zhuxi Poetry, such poems "should all be based on the theory of righteousness and rhyme, not poetry." However, it cannot be denied that there are some good poems that are reasonable, interesting and unreasonable. For example, Zhu Xi and Fan Chengda, like "Thoughts on Reading Books", say, "When half an acre of square pond is opened, the sky is shining and clouds are hovering. To ask the water in the pond, why is it so clear? In order to have flowing water from the source, it is a "work of reasoning with things without rot" (Chen Yan's "The Essence of Song Poetry"). Therefore, it should be comprehensively and dialectically analyzed that people in the Song Dynasty like to discuss into poetry.
Fan Chengda statue