(Tu Fu)
(712–770)
By general consensus Du Fu has been recognized as China’s greatest poet since the ninth century, though he was unsuccessful both as a poet and as a civil servant during his own lifetime. Often called the “poet-historian,” Du Fu delineates, in realistic detail, Chinese life during and after the disastrous An Lushan (An Lu-shan) rebellion of 755. More serious and socially conscious than his contemporary and friend LI BAI (Li Po), Du Fu presents a devout Confucian view in his poetry, in contrast with the Taoism of Li Bai.
Du Fu was born in Xianyang (Hsianyang), in what is now the Henan (Honan) province. He was the grandson of an important court poet (Du Shenyan), and so received the Confucian education that would have been afforded a member of a scholarly family. However he failed the imperial civil service examination in 736, and spent the following years in poverty, wandering about China’s northern provinces. In 745, during his wanderings, he met Li Bai, and was much taken with the older poet. The two remained lifelong friends, despite their temperamental differences, as poems like Du Fu’s “Dreaming of Li Bai” attest.
Du Fu returned to Xi’an (Chang-an), the imperial capital, in 746, to try again to achieve an official post, but once more failed the examinations. In 755, the northeastern provinces rose in rebellion, led by the general An Lushan. The emperor, Xuanzong (Hsuan-tsung), was driven from the capital, and Du Fu was trapped behind enemy lines. Some of his early poems describe his waiting for news of the war and hearing only of the defeats of the imperial forces. Eventually he was able to make his way through the lines to the temporary capital at Fengxiang (Feng-hsiang). After the emperor abdicated in favor of his son Suzong (Su Tsung), Du Fu, in the breakdown of the imperial civil service system, was finally given an official court post by the new emperor. When the emperor succeeded in retaking the capital, however, Du Fu was given a minor post in one of the provinces, at Hua-zhou—a post he was very unhappy with. Ultimately he resigned and returned, with his family, to a life of traveling, first to the northwest and then to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan (Szechuan), where he settled for a while in 760 and seems to have enjoyed the patronage of Yen Wu.After 765, however, Du Fu went back to a life of wandering.He traveled down the Yangtze River and finally to the lakes region of central China in the final year of his life. It was during these last years of traveling that he produced most of his poetry. Du Fu’s poetry stems from his own experiences of poverty, war, and disappointment, and the tone and emotional range of the individual poems tend to reflect the stage of his life during which they were written. Indeed Du Fu encouraged such an interpretation, publishing his poems in chronological arrangements in their earliest editions—a practice continued in subsequent printings of his poetry. In general the poems display the Confucian ethical emphasis on family, society, and the state, and, in particular, Du Fu is known for his sympathetic depiction of the human suffering caused by the An Lushan revolt. There is also a tremendous variety and range in Du Fu’s poems both in style (he ranges from the colloquial to the formal) and subject matter (he may write about gardens, about paintings, about his family, about the defeat of imperial armies). But one likely reason for Du Fu’s continuing appeal is his portrayal of the details of personal life, as in his poem “Jiang Village,” which describes his reunion with his family during the time of war and of his service of the emperor:
From west of the towering ochre clouds
The sun’s rays descend to the plain.
In the brushwood gate birds raise a racket:
From a thousand miles the traveler comes home.
Wife and children are amazed I survived,
When surprise settles, they wipe away tears . . .
(Owen 1996, 423)
Unappreciated during his own life, the depth and complexity of Du Fu’s poetry and the keen intellect behind it began to be recognized in the early ninth century. His influence on subsequent Chinese poetry was immense, even greater than that of Li Bai, and his work is considered much more representative of the classic poetry of the TANG DYNASTY than that of his great contemporary.
Bibliography
■ Chou, Eva Shan. Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
■ Hawks, David. A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1967.
■ Owen, Stephen, ed. and trans. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: Norton, 1996.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.