TU FU

born 712, Hsiang-yang, now in Honan province, China died 770, Hunan Pinyin Du Fu Chinese poet, considered by many literary critics to be the greatest of all time. Born into a scholarly family, Tu Fu received a traditional Confucian education but failed in the imperial examinations of 736. As a result, he spent much of his youth traveling, during which he won renown as a poet and met the other poets of the period, including the great Li Po. After a brief flirtation with Taoism while traveling with Li Po, Tu Fu returned to the capital and the conventional Confucianism of his youth. He never again met Li Po, despite his strong admiration for his older, freewheeling contemporary. During the 740s Tu 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. Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract imperial attention by submitting a succession of literary products in which political advice was offered, couched in a language of ornamental flattery, a device that eventually resulted in a nominal position at court. He married, probably in 752, and acquired some farmland; but by then he showed signs of a lung affliction. In 755 during the An Lu-shan Rebellion, he 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, and he was relieved of his post. Undergoing another period of poverty and hunger, the poet lived to see several of his children die of starvation. Wandering about until the mid-760s, he served a local warlord, a position that enabled him to acquire some landed property and to become a gentleman farmer at Kuei-chou. In 768 he again started traveling aimlessly toward the south. He died in 770, probably at Tan-chou. Popular legend attributes his death to overindulgence in food and wine after a 10-day fast. Tu Fu's early poetry celebrated the beauties of the natural world and bemoaned the passage of time. He soon began to write bitingly of war, as in The Army Carts, a poem about conscription, and with hidden satire, as in The Beautiful Woman, which speaks of the conspicuous luxury of the court. As he matured, and especially during the years of extreme personal and national turmoil of 755 to 759, his verse began to sound a note of profound compassion for humanity caught in the toils of senseless war. Tu Fu's paramount position in the history of Chinese literature rests, finally, 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 l shih, or regulated verse, which he refined to a point of glowing intensity. Additional reading William Hung, Tu Fu, China's Greatest Poet (1952, reissued 1969); A.R. Davis, Tu Fu (1971).