Poetry is also the highest and unparalleled. For example, Lin Xiaoxiang Kui's poem of picking chrysanthemums, Xue's satirical poem, and "Xie Fu" have all become famous works of all ages. If you watch A Dream of Red Mansions carefully, you will sincerely admire Cao Gong, because A Dream of Red Mansions was not written by the first person. Cao Gong lives with every character from the perspective of God, so when he writes poems, he needs to pay attention to everyone's different personalities and create novels with different styles.
He needs to write poems according to the style of each character, which is really difficult. A Dream of Red Mansions is a vernacular novel, but many new readers will find it difficult to understand because it is written in classical Chinese, but this is not the case. There are many poems in this book, but it is not incomprehensible. On the contrary, in order to make everyone understand, the poems in the book are presented in different ways. Because of this, the poems in the book have different meanings. So what is the poetic level of A Dream of Red Mansions? Cao Xueqin was originally a poet. His level may belong to level 3 and level 4. No publisher is willing to publish his poems. He is too poor to publish his own poems. At that time, because Qianlong loved to write poems, scholars were proud of writing poems. Some people can't get out of their own poetry collections, so they launch their own poems in the form of talented women and beautiful women novels. Cao Xueqin helped Zhi Yanzhai rewrite The Story of the Stone for this purpose.
The description level of praise novels is not as good as that of poetry, although the level of poetry is also very general. However, Cao Xueqin finally achieved the goal of being handed down from generation to generation by adapting the Story of the Stone, but the Story of the Stone was revised by Cao Xueqin, which is a pity. In A Dream of Red Mansions, it can be said that ordinary people have vulgar poems, while elegant people have elegant poems. Xue Pan and Baoyu are typical comparisons. Different women also have different poems. Grandma Liu said that burning caterpillars is a folk doggerel, but it is in line with Grandma Liu's personal design. You can't say that Cao Xueqin has reached this level. Even in Tang poetry, there is no such thing as "crossing the crane shadow in the cold pool and burying the flower soul in the cold moon". I have read many poems of Qing poets. I once found a collection of poems in the Qing Dynasty in the pavilion. I think Cao Xueqin is definitely the best poet in Qing Dynasty.