In this piece, Owen examines many
poems by Tu Fu while discussing Tu Fu’s history,
life, and overall style. Tu Fu lived in the Tang and his family was respectable. His clan base was in the capital region (which might explain his concern for the empire over regional affiliations). However, his family was not socially or politically powerful. While Tu Fu had lots of contacts in the
great clans, he was not an equal to them.
As a young man (~20 yrs old?) he took the civil service examination and failed. So he traveled for a while. Ten years later he returned to the capital to take a special exam for people who had previously failed. But in an extraordinarily dick move, the minister presiding over this exam failed everyone to show that the previous exams had not failed anyone worthy. Tu Fu spent several years making connections, and presented the emperor with a gift. As a result, he was given a “special” exam which he passed.
However, this was not as great as it seemed, because Tu Fu went unassigned for years. When he did get an assignment in 754, it was the worst and lowest possible post. So he left in 755 to spend
time with his family. The general An Lushan rebelled during his absence.
At age 47 he was demoted in a purge and quit the next year. Five-sixths of his poems were written after his resignation. He spent this latter part of his life wandering through the provinces.
Tu Fu drew from the ancients a great deal. By doing so, he also affected the interpretations of the ancients for future generations. His work helped shape the future of Chinese
poetry. He was also ground-breaking, in part becase he covered many different aspects and moods. He was a stylistic genius and was characterized by the wide scope presented by his poetry. He served as “the poet of social protest, the confessional poet, the playful and casual wit, the panegyricist (eulogist) of the imperial order, the poet of everyday life, the poet of visionary imagination”. He also used colloquial and informal expressions more than any other poet, and experimented with new styles of poetry. But at the same time, he was the poet most knowledgeable and aware of the ancients. A great deal of Tu Fu’s work focused on or alluded to contemporary political history, especially the An Lushan rebellion. The rebellion is considered one of the greatest topics of Tang poetry, thanks to Tu Fu’s poems about it. He was friends with Li Po, another great Tang poet. The two were posthumously considered as the standard of greatness by later poets like Han Yu. Tu Fu also wrote about things that had previously not been written about in poems. For example, he writes about market transactions, something had been discussed in prose works but never in poems. He also wrote about his family and wife (56), along with the tedious nature of work in ways that had not previously been done.for him, poetry was not limited to formalized events, but was appropriate to many aspects of life. His poems were the most naturalistically written poems that anyone had seen before then.
At the same time, his poems were full of meaning and complexities that he saw in the
world, as opposed to the relatively simple view of the world held by most Tang poets at the time. He also wrote long narratives about his own experiences. In both his poetry and narratives he combined the private and the public, describing his own experiences and what was going on in greater society (for example, in A Song of My Cares When Going from the Capital to Feng-xian). A characteristic scene in his poetry was “the self alone in an uninhabited or haunted world”
When Tu Fu vowed to abandon his political career, he was not rich (like most poets who vowed to abandon their political careers for the simple life). Therefore, this was much more drastic for him. Tu Fu and his friend Li Po felt that poetry very important, more so than their contemporaries did. For Tu Fu, poetry was his chance to make his name in history (sinnce his political career had failedIn Tu Fu’s old age, he saw the world as filled with omens. Several of his poems have a great sense of starkness and desolation.
Overall, Tu Fu was never a central poetic figure in his day. However, after his death he became a figure of literary greatness (along with Li Po), thanks mainly to references by eminent Mid-Tang literary figures such as Han Yu. Their work frequently echoed Tu Fu’s poetry.
More summaries about the Tu Fu