Cao's poetry is generous and sad, which has entrusted his political ambition and life feelings. Lu Xun once rated him as "the founder of transforming literature".
As the seventh son of Jian 'an, Cao Cao also left many well-known poems, which embodied the human soul. In Cao Cao's poems, he lamented the hardships of people's lives in troubled times, and more importantly, his ambition to change reality and unify the world. Poetry handed down has become a masterpiece through the ages. This is beyond the reach of Sun Quan and Liu Bei.
Cao Cao's poems are unpretentious and unpretentious. They won with deep affection and charm. Poetically, it is characterized by generosity and sadness. Generosity and sadness, originally the keynote of Jian 'an literature, are the most typical and prominent in Cao Cao's poems.
In terms of poetic genre, Cao Cao's Yuefu poems did not copy the rules of Han Yuefu, but developed. For example, Lu Luxing and Good Li Xing are both elegies in Han Yuefu, but he uses old topics to express new contents. Cao Cao initiated the tradition of writing current affairs with Yuefu, which had far-reaching influence.