Abstract: Like the exterior and interior relations, the retro thoughts trend in literature shared a mutual interdependence with the retro trend on music in Confucian classicism. Song Lian initiated the literature of Ming while Leng Qian pioneered the musicology correspondingly. Song Lian and his followers' esteem for Leng Qian directly represented the retro thoughts of contemporary scholarofficials and their musicology ideas to reform the world with ancient music. In terms of literature, they canonized the harmony of music and poetry exemplified in The Book of Songs and Song Lian further denied the validity of poetry afterwards. Eventually the Hongwu ruling period (1368-1398) saw a restoration of order with northern music, which was a legacy of the Jin and Yuan dynasties. And then Song Lian was sentenced to death by the emperor and Leng Qian became secluded, leaving his prosody to fade out. The retro thoughts trend on music revived after the Zhengde (1491-1521) and Jiajing (1507-1566) periods with recurrent debates on the Da Sheng prosody and Leng Qian prosody. The phenomenon actually was a re-examination of the popularizing process and changes related to music after the fall of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), even after Emperor Xuanzong in the Tang dynasty (618-907), who had promoted greatly the imperial music academy. Meanwhile, it was also the restructuring of Northern and Southern music after the Song dynasty, corresponding with the retro thoughts in literature in the North and South at the time.

Key words: Leng Qian prosody, the retro thoughts trend (on music) in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, enacting of rites and music, literature in the North and South