Though claiming to model on the poetry in the Great Tang dynasty, the Revivalist School in the Ming dynasty in fact bestowes a disproportionate privilege upon Du Fu. In the anthology Shijing by Lu Shiyong in the late Ming dynasty, Du Fu's poetry occupies the highest percentage - which seems fairly correspondent to the literary trend at that time. The book, however, at the same time stresses the significance of Li Bai and even Wang Wei, forming a critical framework in which the contributions of all the three great poets are equally valued. Such a framework strikes a great blow against the tradition of Revivalist poetics and, simultaneously, triggers a project on the reconstruction of the image of the Great Tang dynasty. This article investigates the image thus reconstructed through Lu Shiyong's criticism of Du Fu's poetry, and also attempts at interpreting the significance implied in this reconstruction. It begins with a discussion on Lu Shiyong's double standard with which he carries out his criticism of Du Fu: on the one hand, he highly values Du's poetry from the perspective of "Yi" and "Li;" on the other hand, he also criticizes Du Fu of violating the spirit of poetry in terms of "Qing" and "Yun." In contrast to Du Fu, Li Bai as the leading poet of the Great Tang dynasty is highly skilled in evoking richer aesthetic fascination with a plain and concise idiom - what is called "Buzhi er zizhi zhimiao." It is due to the same poetic idea that Lu Shiyong particularly elevates the position of Wang Wei in the history of classical poetry. Finally, this article brings up the concept of a "pre-history of Shenyun theory." In doing so, it not only argues that Lu Shiyong in general may be categorized into a genealogy which prefigures Wang Shizhen's "Shenyun theory" raised at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, but also manifests the complexity of the poetic discourse precedent to the formation of the theory