On YAN Shu's CI

Yan Shu was the most important poet of the early Northern Song Dynasty. He exerted a profound and far-reaching influence on the development of Song Proses "Ci".Yan Shu was not only a shi poet, but also a Ci poet. Yan Shu described his philosophy of life and his sentiments or feelings in his Ci and that shaped the special poetic style of himself.In the early Song Dynasty, both the elegant words and exoteric words were popular. As Yan Shu was the leader of Ci poetry, he led Song Ci to a more elegant direction "Shangya". He used a lot of graceful words to describe the environment, characters and the language.There are two different styles of Ci poetry developed the heroic abandon "haofang", and the delicate restraint "wanyue". Yan Shu belonged to the later. The subject of Yan Shu's Ci mainly includes three themes: love, anxiety and sorrow. Yan Shu used novel words in his writing and tried to get out of the traditional field. The words Yan Shu used in the proses was different from Wen Ting Yun's and Fong Yan Si's. They were more implicit and tasteful than the other two.Yan Shu had a distinctive contribution of Ci in the early Northern Song Dynasty.