Du Fu

Du Fu, Wade-Giles
romanization Tu Fu, also called Du Gongbu or Du
Shaoling, courtesy name (zi) Zimei (b. 712, Gongxian,
Henan province, China—d. 770, on a riverboat between
Danzhou [now Changsha] and Yueyang, Hunan province),
Chinese poet, considered by many literary critics to
be the greatest of all time.
Born into a
scholarly family, Du Fu received a traditional
Confucian education but failed in the imperial
examinations of 735. As a result, he spent much of
his youth traveling. During his travels he won
renown as a poet and met other poets of the period,
including the great Li Bai. After a brief flirtation
with Daoism while traveling with Li Bai, Du Fu
returned to the capital and to the conventional
Confucianism of his youth. He never again met Li Bai,
despite his strong admiration for his older,
freewheeling contemporary.
During the 740s Du
Fu was a well-regarded member of a group of high
officials, even though he was without money and
official position himself and failed a second time
in an imperial examination. He married, probably in
741. Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract
imperial attention by submitting a succession of
literary products that were couched in a language of
ornamental flattery, a device that eventually
resulted in a nominal position at court. In 755
during An Lushan’s rebellion, Du Fu experienced
extreme personal hardships. He escaped, however, and
in 757 joined the exiled court, being given the
position of censor. His memoranda to the emperor do
not appear to have been particularly welcome; he was
eventually relieved of his post and endured another
period of poverty and hunger. Wandering about until
the mid-760s, he briefly served a local warlord, a
position that enabled him to acquire some land and
to become a gentleman farmer, but in 768 he again
started traveling aimlessly toward the south.
Popular legend attributes his death (on a riverboat
on the Xiang River) to overindulgence in food and
wine after a 10-day fast.
Du Fu’s early
poetry celebrated the beauty of the natural world
and bemoaned the passage of time. He soon began to
write bitingly of war—as in “Bingqu xing” (“The
Ballad of the Army Carts” ), a poem about
conscription—and with hidden satire—as in “Liren
xing” (“The Beautiful Woman” ), which speaks of the
conspicuous luxury of the court. As he matured, and
especially during the tumultuous period of 755 to
759, his verse began to sound a note of profound
compassion for humanity caught in the grip of
senseless war.
Du Fu’s paramount
position in the history of Chinese literature rests
on his superb classicism. He was highly erudite, and
his intimate acquaintance with the literary
tradition of the past was equaled only by his
complete ease in handling the rules of prosody. His
dense, compressed language makes use of all the
connotative overtones of a phrase and of all the
intonational potentials of the individual word,
qualities that no translation can ever reveal. He
was an expert in all poetic genres current in his
day, but his mastery was at its height in the lüshi,
or “regulated verse,” which he refined to a point of
glowing intensity.