Jia Dao and Meng Jiao, both famous for their bitter songs, are also fond of poverty. Su Dongpo called them "suburban thin".
Jia Dao's bitter poems are outstanding among the poets in the Tang Dynasty, and the stories about his bitter poems have been passed down to this day, reflecting his spirit of bitter poems. He himself said that the poem "Walking alone at the bottom of the pool and counting trees" in "No Man" was "two sentences, which took three years, one song and two tears".
Other poets regard poetry as a reflection of life, or as a pastime and ornament of life, but he replaces life with poetry. In the poem "Playing for Friends", he wrote a poem in his own way: "If you don't write a poem for a day, your heart is like a waste well". He also compared chanting Buddha to a rope, and compared a pen and inkstone to a pulley that turns a rope. He also said that if you study hard again the next morning, you will still get a cold poem. "If you paint from the future, it will still be cold." "Leng" is also easy to see the style and artistic conception of his poems, which has been described as "pure strangeness".
Jia Dao's poetry collection includes ten volumes of The Yangtze River Collection. He is good at five laws, which are the most concentrated. He often has quips such as "People catch the moon in the Yangtze River, the wind burns in the wilderness" and "Chai Men hides cold rain, insects sing autumn vegetables", or the weather is vigorous, or the scene is lonely. Because he put all his energy into Chinese couplets, especially neck couplets, he often gets a good sentence first, and then finishes the article with the beginning and the end. The ideological content comes from a good sentence, so his poems often have only good sentences without the whole article.
Jia Dao avoids social reality, and hardly sees any realistic contradiction in his poems. Many poets expressed their anxiety and indignation at the dark reality of separatist regime, continuous civil war and people's suffering at that time. For example, there are many such works in Meng Jiao's "Concentration", but almost none in Jia Dao's "Concentration". Although he also showed a little bitterness in seeking an official, "How can the first empty bag live in the emperor's hometown?" But this is just a slight sigh. Most of his friends are monks and Taoists, and most of his poems are songs. He seems to be content with his desolate and lonely life situation, which has turned into a strange and bitter poetic realm. He seems to have a special preference for desolation. It seems that only the desolate path can lead to his heart, so as to get more "cold" poems. In ordinary life, he also walked this familiar road, exploring dark corners that others didn't notice. He loves to write about "fireflies" and "ant nests". He even writes about snakes: "Return the official's night key and walk the snake into the ancient tung", and writes about strange birds: "Strange birds crow in the wilderness, and the setting sun fears pedestrians".
Because Jia Dao's life is too narrow, he stands far away from the social reality and looks at the society coldly, which makes his poems obviously insufficient in ideological significance, narrow in content and lacking in touching feelings. Although his bitter attitude towards poetry contributes to the improvement of poetry art, it also shows considerable limitations. Just working hard on individual words can't fundamentally make up for the anemia of poetry. If we compare Lu Fangweng's "If you want to learn poetry, you can learn kung fu outside poetry" and appreciate Lu You's understanding that rich social life is the real source of poetry, we can better understand the regrets and shortcomings of Jia Dao's poetry creation.