Introduction

The An Lushan Rebellion that broke out in 755 set in motion forces that led to the gradual decline of the splendid Tang Empire but helped create a great poet. In 759 Du Fu 杜甫‎ (712–770) left the capital region and began wanderings through west and southwestern China that would occupy the rest of his life. His post-rebellion poetry chronicled the life of a man and his family in a chaotic age. Arguably the greatest Chinese poet, he was certainly the most influential of all Chinese authors in any genre because of the long-lasting and far-reaching impact of his poetry....

Thinking through Poetry

“Thinking through poetry” refers to an associative process of poetic structure, through which Du Fu explores a basic issue. In “Getting Rid of the Blues” the poet addresses the question of empire as circulation, “that which goes far.” The antithetical term is the local, “that which cannot go far.” Poetry is something that circulates throughout the empire, but it often carries the image of the local and, through the image, a desire for what even the emperor cannot have: fresh, ripe lychees.

Ming-Qing Paintings Inscribed with Du Fu’s Poetic Lines

Ming-Qing painters who engaged in the increasingly widespread practice of inscribing lines from Tang and Song poems on their paintings were especially drawn to Du Fu. It was not only Du Fu’s fame but also the intrinsic qualities of his lines that appealed to and challenged the artists as they rendered Du Fu’s couplets in a different medium. This chapter looks at the interaction between the new paintings and old poetic lines that the artists themselves added to their paintings, focusing on two albums of Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts by the seventeenth-century painters Wang Shimin and Shitao. The styles of these two artists diverge sharply, but so too do the ways they adapted their paintings to Du Fu’s lines. Their creative and divergent representations of the Tang poet’s lines may be viewed as another component of Du Fu’s legacy. It is one that, to be sure, lies outside of literary history but is very much a part of aesthetics and cultural history.