A writer needs to refine his feelings and thoughts before he can produce good writing. Prose and poetry are not a crude combination of words and sentences; they are closely associated with the author’s sentiment. Here, sentiment can be understood as a person’s feelings and thoughts as well as his cognition of nature and life. Starting off from his own feelings and thoughts, the writer chooses appropriate wording and sentence patterns to voice his feelings and thoughts. By doing so, he aims to affect and inspire more readers. The greatest attraction of a literary work lies in the profound and unique emotional experience and rational cognition it conveys. Therefore, a writer lacking in emotion, thought and apprehension, even if he exerts his rhetorical skills to the utmost, will only produce superfluous and nonsensical things.

Confucius not only inherited much from his predecessors; he also surpassed them. He compiled and edited the Six Classics in the same way a musical performance commenced with the chiming of bells and concluded with the sound of a stone chime, giving each sagely thought a place in his collections. He refined his feelings and thoughts and turned them into elegant prose. His doctrines seemed to sound like a large wooden bell, with echoes from a thousand li away. His virtue and learning reminded one of the treasures highly appreciated, which would be passed down from generation to generation. His writing highlighted the splendor of the natural world and inspired people’s wisdom. Liu Xie: The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

Poetry, springing from emotions, reads beautifully in its form of expression. Lu Ji: The Art of Writing