Yan Yu’s famous work Cang Lang’s Notes on Poetics, which takes the traditional culture of ancient China, especially the theory of Zen, as its theoretical foundation, investigates into a whole series of fundamental problems of poetic theory, and develops the theoretical mode of “taking Zen as a metaphor”, upon which a whole poetic system consisting in various aspects of ontology，creation theory, text theory and appreciation theory as well, and from which results a wide range of influence on the following poetry critics such as Wang Shizhen.