Bai Juyi's poetic theory includes

Bai Juyi was an extremely important poet in the middle Tang Dynasty. His poetic thoughts and creations, which emphasize popularity and realism, occupy an important position in the history of China's poetry. In Jiu Shu Tong Yuan, he clearly said: "Servants aim to help the two, and they are independent. Always serve the Tao, and invent poetry. Calling it an allegorical poem is also aimed at helping others; It's not bad to call it leisure poetry. " It can be seen that among Bai Juyi's four kinds of poems: irony, leisure, sentimentality and miscellaneous law, the first two reflect his "serving the service and always being good", so they are the most valued. His poetic thoughts are mainly embodied in allegorical poems.

As early as the early Yuan Dynasty, Bai Juyi showed a tendency to emphasize realism, popularity and allegory.

The function of poetry is to punish evil, persuade good and make up current affairs. The means of poetry is praise and criticism, admonition and satire, so he opposes the simple pursuit of "high palace rhythm" and "strange pen" without content, and even more opposes the gorgeous poetic style of "mocking the wind and making flowers and plants" since Qi and Liang Dynasties. In the Preface to New Yuefu, he clearly pointed out that the standards of poetry writing are "quality and diameter", "straightness and tangency", "core and reality" and "smoothness and smoothness", respectively emphasizing that the language should be easy to understand, the arguments should be straightforward and explicit, the writing should be absolutely true and false, and the form should be smooth and fluent, with the color of ballads.

In other words, poetry must be authentic, easy to understand and easy to sing in order to be considered the ultimate. He consciously learned from folk songs and wrote many poems with folk flavor, such as Yang Liuzhi, which is unpretentious, natural and vivid and full of local flavor, which also reflects the poet's conscious pursuit of popular aesthetics. This pursuit is similar to his conscious inheritance of the realistic tendency of Du Fu's poems.

Bai Juyi's above requirements for poetry have only one purpose, that is, to make up for current politics. In "Nine Books with the Same Yuan", he reviewed his early creation and said, "At first, I knew that articles were written in time, and songs and poems were written for things." The first thing to do for time is to show it to the king.