dufu

If there is one undisputed genius of Chinese poetry it is Du Fu. The Taoist Li Bai was more popular, the Buddhist Wang Wei was sublimely simple and more intimate with nature, but the Confucian Du Fu had extraordinary thematic range and was a master and innovator of all the verse forms of his time. In his life he never achieved fame as a poet and thought himself a failure in his worldly career. Perhaps only a third of his poems survive due to his long obscurity; his poems appear in no anthology earlier than one dated one hundred thirty years after his death, and it wasn't until the 11th century that he was recognized as a preeminent poet. His highly allusive, symbolic complexity and resonant ambiguity is at times less accessible than the immediacy and bravado of Li Bai. Most of what we know of his life is recorded in his poems, but there are dangers to reading his poems as history and autobiography. Du Fu is sometimes called the poet of history because his poems record the turbulent times of the decline of the Tang dynasty and constitute in part a Confucian societal critique of the suffering of the poor and the corruption of officials. He also records his own sufferings, exile, falls from grace, the death of his son by starvation; but some critics have suggested that the poems on these themes are exaggerated in the service of self-dramatization.

Du Fu was born to a prominent but declining family of scholar-officials, perhaps from modern day Henan province, though he referred to himself as a native of Duling, the ancestral home of the Du clan. In the Six Dynasties period his ancestors were in the service of the southern courts; his grandfather Du Shenyan, was an important poet of the early Tang dynasty, and a more remote ancestor, Du Yu (222-84), was a famed Confucianist and military man. In spite of family connections, however, Du Fu had difficulty achieving patronage and governmental postings, and twice failed the Imperial Examinations, in 735 and 747. He was a restless traveler, and the poems of this early period show him to be a young man given to revelry, military and hunting arts, painting and music. In 744 he met Li Bai, and this formed the basis for one of the world's most famed literary friendships; the two poets devote a number of poems to each other. In 751 Du Fu passed a special examination that he finagled through submitting rhyme-prose works directly to the emperor, but it wasn't until 755 that he was offered a postCa rather humiliating posting in the provincesCwhich he rejected, accepting instead the patronage of the heir apparent. In the winter of that year, however, the An Lushan Rebellion broke out, and the emperor fled to Sichuan, abdicated, and the heir apparent became the new emperor in Gansu province. Meanwhile, the rebels seized the capital, and Du Fu, attempting to join the new emperor in the distant northwest, was captured by the rebels. He was detained for a year, but managed to escape, and after traveling in disguise through the occupied territory, joined the emperor's court in the position of Reminder. He was arrested soon after four his outspokenness in defending a friend, a general who had failed to win a battle, but was pardoned and exiled to a low posting in Huazhou. He quit his job there, and moved to Chengdu, where he and his family depended upon the kindness of friends and relatives, and moved again and again to avoid banditry and rebellions. In spite of this instability, his poems show a serenity in this period, particularly those from 760-762, when he lived in a Athatched hut provided by a patron and friend named Yan Yu, who hired him in the years that followed as a military adviser. After Yan's death in 765, Du Fu left Chengdu, traveling down the Yangtze River, finding patrons and dreaming of a return to Changan, but being prevented by invasions from Tibet. He spent his final three years traveling on a boat, detained in sickness, and finally winding down to his death as he journeyed down the Yangtze, apparently accepting the withering away of his health and life.

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libai

Li Bai is probably the best known Chinese poet in the West, and with Du Fu is considered the finest poet of the Tang dynasty. He has attracted the best translators。

His brashness and bravado are characteristic of a tradition of poets from this region, including the great Song dynasty poet Su Shi. He claimed he was related to the imperial family, though this claim is likely to be spurious. Perhaps he wondered as a Taoist hermit in his teens; certainly Taoist fantasy permeates his work. He left his home in 725 and wondered through none Yangtze River Valley, hoping to gain recognition for his talents, though he was alone among the great Tang poets in never taking the Imperial Examination. He married the first of his four wives during this period. In 742, he was summoned to the capital of Changan, modern Xian, and was appointed to the Hanlin Academy (meaning "the writing brush forest") by Emperor Xuanzong, and during his time in the capital he became close friends with Du Fu, who addresses a number of poems to him. Within a few years he was expelled from the court and made to leave Changan, and he began presenting himself as an unappreciated genius, or as one friend named him, "a banished immortal." In 755, the An Lushan rebellion took place, in which a Turkish general led his group of Chinese border armies against the emperor. Li Bai was forced to leave Hunan for the South, where he entered the service of the Prince of Yun, sixteenth son of the Emperor, who led a secondary revolt. Eventually, Li was arrested for treason, sent into exile, and was later given amnesty. He continued his wanderings in the Yangtze Valley, seeking patrons, until his death at sixty-two.

About one thousand poems attributed to Li Bai have come down to us, though some of them were probably written by imitators. While most of his poems were occasional poems (poems written for specific occasions), others incorporated wild journeys, Sichuan colloquial speech, and dramatic monologues such as his famous "A Song of Zhanggan Village." Perhaps the most remarkable subject for his poems, however, was himself. He portrays himself as a neglected genius, a drunk, a wanderer through Taoist metaphysical adventures, and a lover of moon, friends, and women. His colloquial speech, and confessional celebration of a sensual flamboyance and fallible self made him the best loved and most imitated Chinese poet in English and helped to establish a conversational, intimate tone in modern American poetry. Ezra Pound's Cathay put him at the center of the revolution in modern verse. All these qualities, plus an extraordinary lucidity of image, made him extremely popular in China as well, in his day and to this day. A number of his poems are in the Han dynasty yuefu form, which allowed him to indulge in radically irregular lines that gave his imagination free play. He was an influential figure in the Chinese cult of spontaneity, which emphasized the poet's genius in extemporizing a poem: "Inspiration hot, each stroke of my pen shakes the five mountains." Among the many legends about Li Bai, the most enduring is the account of his death. Like Ishmael in the crow's nest, wanting to penetrate the illusory world that he saw reflected in the water, Li Bai was said to be so drunk in a boat that he fell overboard and drowned, trying to embrace the moon reflected in the water. Since the "man in the moon" is a woman in Chinese myth, the legend of Li's death takes on an erotic meaning, mixing thanatos and eros. As in Moby Dick, to "strike through the mask" and see the face of truth is to embrace death.
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