First, it sharply criticized the accumulation of allusions in the development of poetry at that time and the deliberate pursuit of melody brought about by the prevalence of the theory of four tones and eight diseases. Zhong Rong believes that poetry was originally a writer's true feelings inspired by foreign things, but "a fertile child is ashamed of his lack of writing, and finally embellishes it and groans at night." One of the results of moaning without illness is to contend with the classics. Zhong Rong pointed out that the fashion of piling up a lot of allusions makes the poetry of "chanting love" almost equal to books and money, which seriously hinders the healthy development of poetry creation. The so-called "catch up, make up, and lose a lot of words." His criticism is a step forward than Liu Xie's criticism in Wen Xin Diao Long Shi Lei. The second manifestation of "your grandchildren" or "fertile children" moaning without illness is to pay attention to tone sickness deliberately. "Fine, subtle, and Yu Ling, which makes the text more taboo and hurts its beauty." Although Zhong Rong neglected to emphasize that the beauty of melody is an inevitable requirement for the development of poetry art to a certain stage, his criticism is inevitably biased, but his view that poetry should be "harmonious in tone" and natural harmony is completely correct.
Secondly, the emergence of five-character poems is explained theoretically. Because the Book of Songs is mainly composed of four characters, it was regarded as a Confucian classic in the past. When the five-character poems in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties have generally developed and replaced the four-character poems as the dominant form of poetry (seven-character poems have begun to take shape), due to the influence of traditional Confucianism, theoretical criticism has also shown a strong orthodox conservative view on the form of poetry: emphasizing four while ignoring five. For example, Zhifu's On Partitions (Yi Wen Ji) holds that "the rate of ancient poetry is based on four words" and "elegant rhyme, four words are positive; Although the rest have twists and turns, they are not right. " Liu Xie's Shi Ming with Literary Mind and Carving Dragons mainly discusses five-character poems, but it also talks about "four-character style" and "five-character style", and does not recognize the proper position of five-character poems in the poetry circle. Zhong Rong pointed out that the form of four-character poems is out of date, "every poem is very complicated and meaningless, so it was difficult to learn from it in the past", while five-character poems are in the ascendant. "As far as the fundamental characteristics of poems are concerned, such as" referring to things and writing them in poverty ",they are the most detailed. This argument is the historical development of poetry form, which opens up a way forward in theory.
In order to advocate five-character poems, Zhong Rong also discussed the origin and historical development of five-character poems. Although there are some inaccuracies, there are many insights in the discussion.
Thirdly, Zhong Rong put forward his own views on some important issues in poetry creation: First, after Wen Fu and Wen Xin Diao Long, he put forward the "taste" of poetry more clearly. In Preface to Poetry, he thinks that only poems with flavor can "make the tasters infinite and the listeners tempted"; In the first volume of "Poetry", it is also proposed that "it is tasteful and tireless". This has two meanings. First, a poem with flavor is a good poem. The second is to emphasize the "interest" of poetry, and think that a good poem should be "more than words but less than meaning". The theory of poetic flavor was not only accepted and developed by many people in later generations, such as Si Kongtu, Su Shi and Wang Shi. Moreover, "the text is exhausted and the meaning is more than enough" has become the same requirement for poetry and prose creation in the future. Second, the principle of "true beauty". Emphasize that poetry creation should be "really beautiful". "True beauty" means that poetry creation should have sincere and strong feelings, not false moans. He also said: "The purpose of nature is difficult to attach importance to people", which shows that "real beauty" is closely related to nature in artistic expression. Thirdly, he proposed that poetry creation should be "shaped by referring to things, and written by poor feelings", and demanded that "poor feelings" and "writing things" should be well combined. This view is consistent with that in Wen Xin Diao Long. In addition, his views on the theme of poetry are one step ahead of the previous ones.
The fourth is about the writer's artistic genre and evaluation. Zhong Rong pays attention to the style characteristics of writers and works, attaches great importance to the inheritance and development relationship between poets of past dynasties and the distinction between different art schools, and puts forward a more systematic view. He not only created a new way for the study of stylistic evolution, but also made some concise and insightful comments on specific writers and works. For example, Ruan Ji's poems are characterized by "words are in the eyes and ears, feelings are in the table of eight shortages", "great ambition, many love stories, and hard to find" and so on. However, because he did not pay much attention to the decisive influence of the writer's life experience on the writer's style, nor did he carefully consider the diversity and complexity of the writer's ideological and artistic aspects, he usually only focused on some similarities in one aspect to study the similarities and differences of different writers' poetic styles. Therefore, in most cases, the study of his style and genre is not only chaotic, but also has many far-fetched views, which have aroused many criticisms from later generations.