On Shen Zengzhi's Scholarly Poetry

Shen Zengzhi, a famous scholar in late Qing Dynasty, wrote a lot of scholar poetry. His poetry contains profound knowledge, classical allusion and witty remarks, with some seldom-used words and phrases. It is never extravagant to say that his poetry reached the peak of perfection so that no one could overpass even though the poetry is abstruse, redundant and rare. Shen's poetry demonstrates that Chinese classical poetry has entered the late modern stage, lost almost all its purity and freshness, and has been exhausted by underlying problems.