Cao Zhi is brilliant and poetic. He is good at all kinds of problems and poetic styles, especially five-character poems. He is a writer who writes five-character poems with great vigour. As far as the poetic art and poetic context are concerned, he is "inclusive and coquettish, and unified Qu, Song and Xun as a generation of masters, ranking above other philosophers" (the conclusion of Selected Poems of the Six Dynasties)
We divide Cao Zhi's life into early and late stages with 220 years as the boundary.
In the early stage, as Xie Lingyun said, Cao Zhi's poems were "only beautiful, not as beautiful as the human world", such as Gong Yan, Cockfighting, Sitting with the King, and some "wedding banquets", but they also left behind poems that exposed social reality and had social practical significance and the significance of the times, such as Poem to See Ying off, which described the mourning of Luoyang, and Du Mingfu, which described aristocratic children.
In the later period, Cao Pi and his nephew were oppressed and excluded by the two emperors, and they were careful everywhere, intertwined with his resentment, sadness, fear and pain. In his own words, they are like "sheep in prison", with no freedom, hard life, political frustration and unfortunate life. But it is also in this way that he can put more energy and emotion into his poetry creation, which makes his poetry layout and highlight a remarkable feature, that is, Zhong Rong said, "the character is extremely high." Literary talent Hua Mao ".