Ouyang Xiu's poetry creation can be divided into three categories in content: (1) poems reflecting people's life and military affairs, such as Eating Bad Men and Border Residents; (2) Express their experiences in official career and show their magnanimous mind and broad-minded spirit; (3) reflecting folk customs and chanting things. There is also a strong argumentative and prosaic tendency.
Ouyang Xiu's poems initially showed the characteristics of taking discussion as poetry and learning as poetry, which obviously got rid of the limitations of the poetic style in the early Song Dynasty and initially laid a relatively grand creative pattern and a new trend of the times with smooth and rich style and interest. Cultural connotation and aesthetic value of European poetry.
Ouyang Xiu's poetry creation achievement is not as good as prose, but it is also very distinctive. Many of his poems reflect people's sufferings and expose the darkness of society. He also discusses current affairs in his poems and attacks corrupt politics. But he wrote more and more successful poems to express his personal feelings and scenery. His poems are mainly influenced by Han Yu in art, and in general, their styles are diverse. Ouyang Xiu is also good at poetry. In Preface to Mei Poetry, he put forward the idea that poetry should be written after poverty, which developed the poetic theories of Du Fu and Bai Juyi and had a great influence on the poetic creation at that time and later generations. His Poems on June 1st is the first poem in the history of China literature. It comments on poetry in a casual and intimate way and becomes a new form of poetry conversation.
Ouyang Xiu's poems have two characteristics, one is poetry based on prose, and the other is poetry based on argument. The most wonderful thing in Ouyang Xiu's poems is his short stories with modern style. The language of this kind of poetry is simple, natural and cordial, and its meaning is smooth and coherent, which has a pioneering role in establishing the natural poetic style in Song Dynasty.
Intensive reading works: Ouyang Xiu's drama Answering Yuan Zhen, Theory of cronies, Biography of Ten Mausoleums in the Five Dynasties, Zuiwengting Ji and Ode to Autumn.