Yet what Emperor could escape immortality who had Tu Fu and Li Po for contemporaries, Ch`ang-an for his capital, and T`ai Chen of a thousand songs to wife?
To them Chinese poetry owes some of its finest inspirations, and at least two of its greatest singers, Tu Fu and Li Po.
And among the living, I have been inspired by Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Abraham Heschel, Howard Zinn, Joel Elkes, and the Chinese teachers
Tu Fu and Tung-Shan.
One could compare this poetry to that of Kooser, Bly,
Tu Fu, even James Wright, but one would only be naming poetic kin.
It was not until 1952 when William Hung published his monumental monograph
Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet that Du Fu studies began to enter into a new age.
No Difference Anymore In the end there was no difference anymore between Plato whom I read at night, and
Tu Fu whose verses I carried in my pocket, and the men of the 20th of July who gave their lives trying to dispose of a tyrant, and the students for whom I tried to open doors, and the elderly woman who on Saturdays smiled as she took my dirty laundry at the Cleaners, and the old Chinese mother who cleaned my office over night-- there was no difference anymore between them.
In the spring of 1988, I remember trailing Charles and Holly Wright as we walked through
Tu Fu's garden and through his cottage.
That said, the content is quite rich, including, among other things, extensive discussions of the tradition of ethical interpretation of the "Confucian Classics" by way of searches for "hidden meanings," of the foundational role of
Tu Fu as a shih-shih poet, including an account of Ch'ien's edition of
Tu Fu's works (pp.
currently reading The Selected Poems of
Tu Fu and Riders in the Chariot
Who was this
Tu Fu, "the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet