His poems have a wide range of themes, satirizing the disadvantages of the times, praising the past, reflecting the sufferings of people's livelihood and seeing friends off, but the poems with frontier fortress theme are the most successful. His frontier poems are vigorous and tragic, mainly describing the heroic spirit of soldiers bravely against the enemy and the nostalgia of frontier soldiers for their hometown.
Poetic style
"Bold and tragic" is the remarkable feature of Gao Shi's frontier poems. His poems are quality-oriented, magnificent and simple. Lofty and lonely, he has the spirit of a ranger. He once roamed Liang and Song Dynasties and devoted himself to self-sufficiency. In addition, he is generous and upright, so his poems reflect a wide range of aspects and profound themes. Gao Shi's psychological structure is extensive, and his personality is straightforward, so his poems often express his mind directly, or talk to each other, and rarely use metaphors.
Gao Shi's poems focus on people rather than the natural landscape, so he seldom writes scenery, and when he expresses his feelings, it is often accompanied by the part of writing scenery, so this scene bears the poet's personal subjective imprint. "Song of Yan" describes the bleak scene with "autumn is exhausted in the dust and sand, the grass is withered, and the sun is setting on the lonely wall", and contrasts it with the desert, hay, lonely city and sunset, forming a picture full of subjective feelings, which makes the heroic and tragic battle of the soldiers more intense. Gao Shi uses simple words in his language style without carving.