Twenty Drinking Poems is a group of five-character poems written by Tao Yuanming, a writer from the late Eastern Jin Dynasty to the early Southern Song Dynasty. These twenty poems take wine as the theme, expressing the author's feelings and views on history, reality and life, expressing the author's dissatisfaction with reality and love for rural life, and fully demonstrating the author's noble and proud moral sentiment and life interest.
Tao Yuanming's group poem "Twenty Drinks" is not a masterpiece of drunkenness, but the poet expresses his dissatisfaction with reality and his love for rural life on the topic of drinking, in order to escape persecution through drunkenness in the very sinister environment at that time. In his twentieth poem, he wrote, "But if you hate many fallacies, be lenient with others", which shows his good intentions.
Tao Yuanming's era is the era of gentry. Political darkness, official corruption, easy to be killed. He felt the coldness of the world and the hardships of life, but he didn't want to bend over for five buckets of rice. Finally, in the first year of Yixi, when he was forty-one, Peng Ze, who had worked for more than eighty days, gave up his official position and retired to the garden. He stopped being an official and bowed himself.
Due to the long-term social division and turmoil, coupled with the extravagance of the rulers, many literati who dared to criticize state affairs were killed innocently. Therefore, the literati at that time did not dare to talk about politics, and all they did was to avoid politics. Some of them express that they have no political ambitions by traveling, retiring from official positions, drinking too much and talking openly about metaphysics, so as not to be suspected by the rulers and cause personal injury.
The abnormal social atmosphere caused by this unpredictable dark reality cannot but affect Tao Yuanming, who was born in a ruined aristocratic family. From the time he first offered wine in Jiangzhou at the age of 29 to the time he went to Peng at the age of 4 1, he lived in seclusion several times before and after. In fact, he was an official for less than three years, and the ideal spark was fleeting in the dark reality.