1. Pastoral poetry: describes the natural quiet pastoral scenery and natural simple pastoral life. This is a realm idealized and artistic by the poet. It reflects the poet's quiet and carefree life interest and carefree and detached mood, and it is also a denial of the dark reality and the ugliness of officialdom at that time. Such as "Returning to the Garden" [less and less vulgar rhyme], [being in the wild], "Drinking" [build house in the human environment], "Master Book of He Guo" and so on. He expressed his experience of ploughing life and his love for labor, and reflected the poet's deep friendship with farmers. Such as "Returning to the Garden" [Planting Beans in the South Mountain] and "Getting Early Rice in Xitian in September of Geng Xu's New Year". Describing the hardship of one's own life and the depression of the countryside reflects the real world outside the poet's idealized realm. Such as "Complaining Poems and Chu Tunes Showing Pang's Master Book Deng Zhizhong", "Returning to the Garden", "Begging for Food" and so on.
2. Poems and historical poems: Tao Yuanming's poems and historical poems are similar in content, and historical poems are also poems, which inherit the poetic traditions of Ruan Ji's Poems and Zuo Si's Poems on History. The main content of poetry is to express personal thoughts, feelings and ambitions. Some show the ideological contradiction between ideal and reality, joining the WTO and being born; Some worries about the realization of life value express the anguish of hard-to-pay ambition; Some reflect the noble character of not colluding with the dark reality and sticking to personal integrity; Others express their angry feelings in the way of "King Kong glaring". Such as Drinking, Imitating the Ancient, Miscellaneous Poems, Chanting for the Poor, Chanting for Jing Ke, Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas, etc. mostly belong to this category.
3. Others: Tao Yuanming's poems on official duties are his works during his official travels, mostly about the hardships of official duties and the content of being tired of being an official and longing for seclusion. Such as "The Qua Zuo of the First Town Army Joining the Army" and so on. Most of the poems are about the friendship between friends. Such as Answering Pang to Join the Army and Farewell to Yin Jin. In addition, Tao Yuanming has some philosophical poems. Such as "Together".
The artistic achievements of Tao Yuanming's poems:
1. The artistic style is simple, natural, mellow and meaningful. The theme and content of Tao Yuanming's poems are close to ordinary daily life, and the images of poems often take things that are often heard by self-study, and they are written directly, which is not false in carving, but not in rhetoric. The profound meaning of Tao Yuanming's pastoral poems only shows the artistic image and artistic conception of the poems with a faint sketch and true feelings, but it is magical in plain and beautiful in simple. Zhu Xi said: "Yuan Ming's poems are plain and out of nature." (Zhuzi Genre) Su Shi said that his poems are: "Quality and reality, but richness and reality." ("Book with Su Zhe") also said: "Dry outside and paste in the middle, it seems light but beautiful." (Comment on Han Liu's Poems on Dongpo's Inscription and Postscript) Yuan Haowen said that his poem: "A word is natural and eternal, and luxury is exhausted." In addition to this basic style, there are some poems that Lu Xun called "King Kong's Glaring Style" ("Two Essays of Jiejieting with Uncertain Title"). Zhu Xi also talked about his bold side: "Everyone says that Tao Yuanming's poems are dull. According to some people, he is proud of it, but he is bold and uninhibited." The person who reveals his true nature is an article "Ode to Jing Ke". How can ordinary people say such words? " (Zhuzi Genre)
2. The artistic realm of lofty, unconventional and natural. The image of Tao Yuanming's poetry seems unremarkable, but it creates an artistic realm of lofty and unconventional. The main idea of his poems lies in freehand brushwork, in expressing his own mind, interest and understanding of life, while writing scenery and narration are just for the sake of meaning. Many of Tao's poems have reached the natural artistic realm of the combination of things and me, the integration of subject and object, and the integration of emotion, scenery and reason.
3. Natural, concise and vivid language. Tao Yuanming's poems are not just ornamentation, but simple and natural language and sparse brushwork are used to concisely outline vivid images, convey profound meanings and achieve the artistic effect of freehand brushwork and vividness. He is good at refining spoken English in daily life into poetry, imbued with a strong flavor of life, and often uses metaphors, symbols, sustenance and other techniques, even if he uses allusions, it is colloquial.