Zhang Ertian’s study of Ci (lyric poetry) has been a significant chapter in the history of modern study of Ci in China. His cultural identity is composed of loyalist elements as well as influences from late Qing new learning and inclinations to follow new trends of his contemporary age, which makes his way of thinking distinct from those old types of Chinese literati. The tension between the old and the new is manifested in his views of Ci as well. On the one hand, when he uses the true, the good, and the beautiful as the framework to conceptualize literature, while taking Ci writing as a kind of literary writing, he also holds the traditional Chinese poetics of allegory in metaphorical comparison, affective image and entrusting meaning to the words, that is, Bi, Xing, and Jituo. On the other hand, when, in his thinking on literature at its function in establishing a social public sphere, he discusses how Ci is closely related to authorial feeling in the act of writing, and emphasizes the role of evidential learning in interpretive reading, in which one can detect many places of ambiguities and vagueness. An observation of Zhang Ertian’s views of Ci reveals a literary figure in the transition between tradition and modernity, and suggests an intellectual landscape of his age.