“水德江南”是一种具体的抽象，是开放性、体认型的理论话语，也是长期以来历史上江南地域特征与人地关系互动过程中的生态、生产、生活以及哲学意义上的观念结晶，其理论特色具有非二元性、非体系化、文史互用、道艺融合的特质，是一种具体而微的中国本土形态美学体系。如何将文学、语文、历史、人物、哲学、艺术、宗教以及地志水文等材料融为一炉，不以抽象的范畴体系把握江南；如何古今贯通，将江南学问、江南文章，活化而为在每一个人的生命中可以体认、百姓日用而不知的道理、诗意与性情，是江南文化诗学理论建构的一次尝试。

“Jiangnan （The south of the Yangtze River） with the virtues of water” is concrete abstraction, a theoretical discourse with the nature of openness and personal experience. It is also the crystallization of ideas in terms of ecology, production, life, and philosophy, produced in the long-term interactivity between humans and land with regional characteristics. It is a miniature Chinese regional morphology and aesthetics with theoretical features such as non-dualism, non-systematism, literary-historical interaction and the integration of the Dao and art. How to integrate literature, language, history, people, philosophy, art, religion, geography, and hydrology into one furnace to grasp Jiangnan without appealing to a system of abstract categories? How to connect ancient and modern times, activate the Jiangnan learning and articles into the truth, poetry and temperament that can be recognized in everyone’s life and exist in people’s daily life without realizing them? These questions cannot be ignored in any attempts to construct the theory of Jiangnan cultural poetics.