As one of the "Eight Masters of Tang and Song Dynasties", Su Shi worked hard on prose all his life and made the greatest achievements. He has more than 4,000 essays of various genres, which can be roughly divided into argumentative essays, narrative essays and essays. The most important argumentative essays are historical and political, such as Thought and Politics, The Six Kingdoms, Teaching War and Defending Policy. Most of these articles commenting on history and discussing politics are lively, magnificent and thorough. He is especially good at using some vivid metaphors to illustrate profound philosophy. Narrative includes monument biography, landscape and so on. His epitaph is good at using the materials and details of the objects described in daily life to describe their characters, represented by Biography of Fangshan Zi. In addition to describing scenery and expressing emotion, landscape travel notes especially like to discuss and expound philosophy, such as The Rain Pavilion and The Story of Shi Zhongshan, the most famous of which are Fu on the Red Wall and Fu on the Back of the Red Wall. These two poems not only express the author's philosophy of life, but also have beautiful language and poetry, which are worthy of being masterpieces in the Song Dynasty. Besides argumentative essays and narrative essays, letters, prefaces and essays also occupy a very important position in Su Shi's prose. Such works can be freely described and discussed, which fully shows the author's personality and humor.
In art, Su Shi's prose has made new progress and development on the basis of predecessors. His prose is bold and natural, magnificent and changeable in artistic techniques, and often breaks through fixed patterns, making scenes and events organically integrated; He is not only good at argumentation, but also often sublimates to the highest level of speculation, especially good at expressing his true feelings. It can be said that Su Shi's prose represents the highest achievement of prose creation in the Northern Song Dynasty.
Su Shi is not only famous for his prose, but also a great poet who learns from others and is unique. He attached great importance to the social function of poetry and dared to use poetry to expose the shortcomings of the times. Among more than 2,700 existing poems, social and political poems occupy an important position. Especially after the "Wutai Poetry Case", he had a deeper understanding of reality, and his poetry creation reached a state of perfection. He fully absorbed the different styles of previous great poets such as Tao Yuanming, Li Bai and Du Fu, and formed his own unique style, which is bold, vigorous, fresh, elegant, graceful, simple and humorous. He used poetry to express his concern about the future of the country and the sufferings of the people's livelihood, expressed the beauty of mountains and rivers, and expressed his deep affection for relatives and friends. Rich imagination and vivid metaphor are the outstanding artistic features of Su Shi's poems. In the poem A Hundred Steps of Flood, he used seven metaphors to describe the majestic, fantastic and vivid image of water potential. In the history of poetry, Su Shi is another peak after Li Bai and Du Fu.
In the creation of ci, Su Shi wrote ci in the spirit of poetry innovation movement, further developed the artistic conception of ci on the basis of Liu Yong's development of long-tune and slow-tune ci, turned the singer's ci into a poet's ci, broke the tradition of "expressing feelings with ci" and created a bold ci style. Su Shi used words to talk about feelings, narrate feelings, chant history, reason, and talk about Zen, and really achieved "no intention to enter, nothing to say."