On Wang Anshi's Mood, Poems and Styles in His Later Years

Living in seclusion for about ten years, Wang Anshi, the politician and writer of the Northern Song Dynasty, was filled with the great indignation after he had failed to his introduce his reforms. During this period, he wrote a great many eight-line and four-line rhymed poems through either scenery or objects revealing his thoughts and singing of his feelings of ambition, resentment, agony and unwillingness to accept the fate. The poems of the period shaped his poetic styles of indignation and indifference to fame, which were quite different from his political poems written as an official.