Generally speaking, there are four general schools:
Wang Ti: It is Wang Anshi's poetic style. Although it is a poetic style, it later flowed into ci, and this poetic style can be said to have reached its peak in quatrains. Wang Ti's style is that he has spent a lot of effort on the formal features of sentences, striving for uniqueness, profundity, gentleness and roughness of sentences, and combining the style of Tang poetry with the sentiment of Song poetry, which has a great influence on Song poetry.
Yi 'an style: Li Qingzhao has a saying that her lyrics are different, so Li Qingzhao strives to be "unique" in her lyrics. Yi 'an style is different from other words, and its biggest feature is that Yi 'an style introduces common sayings from life into words, which makes it feel novel to read. Secondly, Li Qingzhao is the first poetess in history, and her ci style is the saddest among the graceful ci styles, which is the representative system of farewell words. Thirdly, some works of Yi 'an Ci are also masculine. Xin Qiji, the representative figure of the unconstrained ci in Song Dynasty, also created Yi 'an style ci. Xin Qiji's Yi 'an Ci poetry combines rigidity with softness, which is another major feature of Yi 'an Ci poetry.
Chengzhai style: it is a style of Yang Wanli, a poet in the Southern Song Dynasty. The greatest feature of this style is that the poet can keenly discover the characteristics and laws of natural changes. Therefore, most poems are about scenery, and poets will not be easily discovered by ordinary people and integrate the scenery that ordinary people easily ignore into their own opinions. This is the word of Chengzhai style.
Tieya Style: Yang Weizhen, a poet at the end of Yuan Dynasty, was named Tieya Style, so his ci style was called Tieya Style. Generally speaking, iron cliffs can be divided into four types:
Palace ci, which is famous for its freshness and beauty, often uses gorgeous moves to describe some romantic things;
Fragrant poems make people feel considerate to read, similar to the words describing beautiful scenery in graceful schools, which make people feel romantic or comfortable to read, fragrant but not gorgeous;
"Zhi Zhu Song" mostly adopts the tune of Wu Di-min's songs, and it is also a feeling of men and women, but the sentence is more lively and generous than other systems and palace words, and my feelings are free and easy;
Gu Yuefu: At that time, it was a new system, trying to use a style with both peaks and valleys, which was different from the ancient Yuefu poems and new poems at that time. The style was rough and heroic.
The artistic features and aesthetic attributes of Song poetry are obviously different from those of Tang poetry. Yan Yu summed it up clearly in Cang Lang Shi Hua: "Poetry is based on words, poetry is based on discussion, and poetry is based on learning" is the basic feature of Song poetry. Song people did not follow the footsteps of the Tang Dynasty and found another way. Although their spirit is commendable, they introduced the means and laws of prose into poetry to promote the prosaic culture of poetry, and there were too many direct narratives and Chen Pufu, especially the lack of traditional comparison methods, which led to the loss of some aesthetic interests such as images and artistic conception in Song poetry. However, Song poetry also enriched the artistic techniques of poetry, especially opened up a new pattern of "emphasizing reason in Song poetry" and enriched new fields of artistic means such as lyricism in poetry discussion. Regarding emotion and reason, Tang poetry also attaches importance to reason, which is only dominant and secondary. Moreover, emotion dominates rationality, which is often expressed implicitly by means of images and artistic conception. The combination of "reason" and "emotion" is the highest aesthetic realm of reasoning poems in Tang Dynasty. In this sense, it is reasonable that Song poetry is slightly inferior to Tang poetry, which also reflects that poetry innovation can only be carried out on the premise of retaining its most basic aesthetic principles. There are many schools of poetry in the Song Dynasty, and the leading one is the "Yongjia Siling" school represented by Yang Wanli. They try to follow the path of folk poetry and attach importance to drawing new supplies from spoken language. Although he eventually failed because of "arrogance and cleverness", his creative path is correct. In addition, in terms of the number of creations alone, the poems of Lu You, a patriotic poet in the Southern Song Dynasty, have reached a certain height. Because of the rise of philosophical poetry and Zen poetry, it is particularly useful to take learning as poetry, which eventually leads the prose poem Song poetry astray and forms two extreme fortresses: "Kunxi Style" and "Jiangxi Poetry School". The "Quincy School" poets developed some formalistic tendencies in Li Shangyin's creation, paying attention to piling up allusions and rhetoric. Jiangxi Poetry School, represented by Su and Huang, exhausted all the advantages of poetry and exposed all its shortcomings. Huang Tingjian's "replacing bone with fetus" is even more extreme. The Tang people picked it by hand, without showing traces, and still saw spirituality. The Song people liked to buy and learn, and they paid attention to writing poems without words and sources. The reason why Song poetry is inferior to Tang poetry is that it abandons traditional artistic means such as thinking in images, and it also lies in the fact that Song poetry did not further explore new fields from the ideological content of poetry, but underwent major surgery and made a big fuss about artistic forms, and eventually declined with the demise of Song.