Bai Juyi put forward the concept of "sentimental poetry" in "the letter to Yuan Jiu", and defined it as "things are outside, emotions move inside, and feelings meet and form in the Aria". It can be seen that Bai Juyi's sentimental poetry is not so sentimental as emotional poetry. Bai Juyi's definition of sentimentality is closely related to the lyric tradition of Chinese classical poetics. By examining the relationship between the theory of "matters, things, emotions and reasons", we can realize that his sentimental "feeling" is inclusive, though it mainly expresses sadness. Therefore, the "emotion" of "sentimentality" is also expanded. No matter from which level, his sentimental poems are " expanded sentimental".
The creation of Bai Juyi's sentimental poems is greatly influenced by the lyric tradition, especially the sentimental theme of Chuci. Bai Juyi's sentimental works with different themes, such as sad spring and sad autumn, dusk consciousness and hate consciousness, inherit and develop the transformation of the sentimental works of Du Fu, Liu Changqing, Jiang Yan and other predecessors.
The sentimental and lyrical nature of Bai Juyi's poems determines that the anthology becomes his sentimental memoir. His sentimental consciousness of poetic creation can be realized by his time consciousness which is higher than that of others. The overflowing of sentimental emotion urges Bai Juyi to change the time consciousness into the time level by constantly repeating the theme and language of his poems. Bai Juyi mainly constructs the time hierarchy by diary and recollection, and writes the personal life history of great significance to the history of Chinese lyric literature and narrative literature. It can be said that Bai Juyi's sentimental poems are lyric literature with the characteristics of narrative literature.
Bai Juyi's sentimental poetry not only enriches the traditional artistic practice of Chinese sentimental literature, but also displays a strong Qi Liang style. For example, the moon that Bai Juyi used to express his sentimental mood came from the poetic tradition before the Tang Dynasty, but he and Yuan Zhen expressed their sentimental feelings with "the dim moon", which showed their different feminine qualities. Their strong desire for possession of the moon was also different from the traditional poems that expressed their sentimental feelings with the moon. He enriched the literature of heartbreak, strengthened its connection with music, and It further weakened its physiological sense of disobedience, and was widely accepted by later generations of scholars, making it a fixed poetic expression of sentimentality. To the end, the poetic expression "Lotus decline" was divided into three relatively independent systems of sentimentality: "Lotus decline" and its closely related "withered tree" system, the "Lotus death" system influenced by the poetry style of Qi and Liang dynasties, and the "Lotus death" system highlighting a strong female temperament as well as the private one The memory highlights the personalized "dry lotus" system. The relationship between these three systems and sentimentality is strong or weak, which together promoted literature after the middle Tang Dynasty to attach importance to the images of "wither", "decline" and "death".