They are famous poets with small official positions, young talents and high talents. They played a connecting role in the early Tang Dynasty, connecting Chen Liang and Shen Song. Among them, Lu and Luo Shange, Wang and Yang Shan have five laws. Later generations said that Tang poetry with both temperament and character was shaped from them.
They began to move poetry from the palace to the market, from Taige to Jiangshan and Saimo, with expanded themes and serious thoughts, and the form of five-character and eight-sentence rhythm poetry began to take shape. With the conscious change of writing style, they have a very clear aesthetic pursuit: opposing delicacy and advocating vitality. Although their poems failed to shake off the ethos of the Southern Dynasties, the change of their poetic style and the expansion of their themes predicted the future development direction of Tang poetry and played a positive and progressive role. They are the real pioneers of Tang poetry. In the history of Tang poetry, they are pioneers who dare to reform the poetic style of Qi and Liang Dynasties. Tang Taizong likes palace poems, and his poems are mostly romantic, with obvious traces of Qi Liang's palace poems. Shangshuling Shangguan Yi also inherited the legacy of Sui Chen, and his works were all the rage, and scholars rushed to follow suit, which was called "Shangguan Style" in the world.
When Qi Liang's formalistic poetic style was still dominant in the poetic world, the "Four Masters" stepped forward. Wang Bo first stood up against this unhealthy trend in the early Tang Dynasty, and then the other three also stood up in response and joined in the creative activities against "Shangguan Style".
They tried to break through the cage of the legacy of Qi and Liang Dynasties and the "official style", and moved poetry from a narrow court to a vast market, from a narrow pavilion to a vast border of mountains and rivers, which opened up the theme of poetry, enriched the content of poetry, endowed poetry with new vitality, improved the ideological significance of poetry at that time, showed a new poetic style, and promoted the development of poetry in the early Tang Dynasty towards a healthy road. Generally speaking, the contribution of the four outstanding poets to the development of Tang poetry is mainly manifested in the following two aspects:
First of all, it is manifested in the theme and content of the works, including poems describing history and things, as well as landscape poems, such as Wang Bo's Preface to Wang Tengting; Or express the feelings of parting, such as "Farewell to Du DuDu's appointment in Shu", which is a famous article that has been told through the ages; And Luo's "Yu Yishui gives away". Some people praise recruiting people to be stationed in remote areas, some describe recruiting husbands and thinking about women, and some express sympathy for unfortunate women. All four people are talented and have low status, which makes them closer to social reality, so poetry is often used to expose some social phenomena.
Four outstanding poets changed the bad poetic style left by Qi Liang with their own creative practice and achieved certain results.
Secondly, the four outstanding poets in the early Tang Dynasty laid the foundation for the five-character poem and made it mature. The Five-character Law appeared before the "Four Masters", and Wang Ji, a poet in the early Tang Dynasty (Wang Bo is Wang Ji's nephew), also made efforts, but his works were few. It was not until the "four great masters" that the five laws were fully developed and gradually fixed in their works. The "Four Masters" created a large number of high-quality poems, which laid a good foundation for Shen Quanqi and the later metrical poems in Song Dynasty.
Five-character ancient poems flourished after the Three Kingdoms period, while seven-character ancient poems did not prosper until the Tang Dynasty. The four masters (Yang Jiong without seven-character poems) pushed the seven-character ancient poems to a mature stage with a large number of excellent works. Therefore, the achievements of the four outstanding poets in the early Tang Dynasty in the development of poetic forms are worthy of full recognition. Among them, Wang and Yang are good at five laws, while Lu and Luo are good at seven ancient (seven words). They played an important role in the history of literature. Du Fu, a great realistic poet, praised the "Four Masters".