TU FU (740)

Considered by many literary critics to be the greatest Chinese poet of all time.

Born into a cholarly family -his grandfather was a well-known poet and his father an official of medium rank-.. Tu Fu received a traditional Confucian education but failed in the Imperial examinations wasof 736.
A passing grade in the examination was necessary to secure a post in the Confucian bureaucracy that ran the country.
As a result he spent much of his youth trabelling 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 travelling with Li Po he returned to the capital and the conventional Confucianism of his youth.
He never again met Li Po despite his strong admiration for his older free-wheeling 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 attempted 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.

Me married probably in 752 and acquired some farmland but by then he showed signs of a lung affliction.

In 755 he was caught in the An Lu-shan Rebellion which eventualy brought down the T´ang dynasty and he experienced extreme personal hardships. He escaped 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 he finally arrived at Ch´eng-tu late in 759. There with the help of friends he built a thatched hut.
Starting to drift again in the mid-760s he was at Kueichou in the service of a local war lord a position that enabled him to acquire some landed property and to become a gentleman farmer.

In 768 he again started travelling 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 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 equalled 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 will ever reveal. He was an expert in all poetic genres current in his day but his mastery was at its height in the lü shih or regulated verse which he refined to a point of glowing intensity.