The Preface to Poetry lists the excellent five-character poems in the past dynasties, among which the excellent five-character poets are all composed of top-grade and middle-grade poets, and there are ten middle-grade poets. Among the thirty-nine China poets, ten were praised by Zhong Rong for their enmity and beautiful words. Such as Ji Kang, Liu Kun, Guo Pu, Yan Yanzhi, Bao Zhao and Xie Huilian. Among them, Zhang Hua is a poet who suspects the weakness of the upper class and suffers from the weakness of the middle class. Tao Yuanming was praised by Zhong Rong as a "five-word warning strategy" and entered the list of bidders with the system of "praising poverty". From Tao Yuanming's dominant position in domestic products, it can be seen that Zhong Rong attaches importance to Tao Yuanming.
Zhong Rong is strict with modern poets. Among the top 12, there are three in Han, five in Wei San, five in Jin, only one in Song Xie Lingyun and none in Qi Liang, which is one of the reasons.
Zhong Rong clearly expressed his own poetic ideas in his poems: the theory of taste, the theory of seeking directly, and the theory of drying with wind and moistening with Cai Dan. The Tao poetry of "faithfulness is really ancient" naturally conforms to the theory of "taste" and "direct search", but it is deficient in "air-dried, Dan-colored and moist", which is still far from Zhong Rong's poetic realm of "high tolerance and flowery words", which is one of the reasons why Zhong Rong classified Tao Yuanming into the middle class.
The literary criticism of the whole Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties also influenced Zhong Rong. As we all know, Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties were the golden age in the history of ancient literature in China. From Cao Pi's poems, Lu Ji's poems, Liu Xie's Wen Xin Diao Long and Zhong Rong's poems, we can see that the literary proposition of beauty is gorgeous at this time.
Before Zhong Rong, Liu Xie, Shen Yue and Xiao Zixian did not mention Tao Yuanming's poetry creation. In this case, Zhong Rong listed Tao Yuanming as a product of China and called him a "recluse poet", which was the beginning of truly pushing Tao Yuanming into the mainstream of China literature history. Therefore, Zhong Rong's evaluation of Tao Yuanming's taste is fair, which is not easy from his time.
Later scholars believed that the main reason why Zhong Rong belittled Tao Yuanming was that since the Tang and Song Dynasties, scholars have been praising Tao Yuanming. For example, Li Bai once praised Tao Qian in For Zheng Liyang, and Du Fu praised Du Fu in The River is Like the Sea. Among the literati in the past dynasties, Su Shi in the Northern Song Dynasty was the one who admired Tao Qian the most. In his book with Su Zhe, he said: "I am not good at poets, but only good at profound poems." Yuan Ming wrote few poems, but his poems are qualitative and realistic. Since Cao, Liu, Bao, Xie, Li and Du, they are all out of reach. "Later, Yuan Haowen commented on Tao Qian in" On Poetry "and said," A word is natural and not out of date, but it ends in luxury. In the south window during the day, but Yuan Ming was not hurt by the Jin people. Wang Shizhen's Poems on Yu Yang said: "Tao Qian should be in the top grade". After the Tang and Song Dynasties, the literati's understanding of Tao Yuanming was based on such a height, and they criticized Zhong Rong for listing Tao Qian as a domestic product. However, to evaluate the right or wrong of an opinion, we should comment on it in the background of its generation. It is bound to cause misunderstanding to future generations to measure Zhong Rong's viewpoint unilaterally from his own social environment. Therefore, Zhong Rong's criticism of Tao Yuanming's quality is caused by the wrong starting point of later generations, and Zhong Rong's view of the poem itself is not wrong.