Du Fu

Du Fu was a Chinese poet and politician of the Tang dynasty. Along with his elder contemporary and friend Li Bai he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations.

About Du Fu in brief

Du Fu was a Chinese poet and politician of the Tang dynasty. Along with his elder contemporary and friend Li Bai he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and his last 15 years were a time of almost constant unrest. Although initially he was little-known to other writers, his works came to be hugely influential in both Chinese and Japanese literary culture. Of his poetic writing, nearly fifteen hundred poems have been preserved over the ages. He has been called the \”Poet-Historian\” by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed him to be introduced to Western readers as \”the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire\”. Traditional Chinese literary criticism emphasized the life of the author when interpreting a work, a practice which the American scholar Burton Watson attributed to. Since many of Du Fu’s poems feature morality and history, this practice is particularly important. For modern Western readers, the less accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to understand it altogether.

Du Fu was born in 712; the exact birthplace is unknown, except that it was near Luoyang, Henan province. In later life, he considered himself to belong to the capital city of Chang’an, ancestral hometown of the Du family. His paternal grandfather was Du Shenyan, a noted politician and poet during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian. He also had three half brothers and one half sister, to whom he frequently refers in his poems, although he never mentions his stepmother. He later claimed to have produced creditable poems by his early teens, but these have been lost. In the early 730s, he travelled in the JiangsuZhejiang area; his earliest surviving poem, describing a poetry contest, is thought to date from the end of this period, around 735. In 744, he met Li Bai for the first time and the two poets formed a friendship which gave him a living. The relationship was somewhat one-sided, however, as Li Bai was already a poetic star. We have twelve poems to or about Li Bai from the younger poet, but only one in the other direction. We never attempted to petition the prime minister again, instead petitioning instead for the emperor to make him prime minister. He never attempted the petitioning again, but instead tried to resurrect his official career in an attempt to resurrect an official career. He is believed to have died in 746, and moved to the city of Hangzhou, where he lived for the rest of his life.

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