The story
Li Bai (701 to 762) and Du Fu (712 to 770) are usually named as the two greatest poets of China. They lived through the high point of the Tang dynasty and its near collapse in the An Lushan Rebellion that began in 755. They met around 744 and spent a short time together as friends; Du Fu wrote many poems to Li Bai, who wrote fewer to him.
Li Bai, called the Immortal of Poetry, wrote about wine, the moon, friendship and Daoist wandering in free, vivid verse, such as 'Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon' and 'Quiet Night Thought'. Du Fu, called the Sage of Poetry or poet-historian, wrote in a denser, more controlled style about war, famine, family and the cost of politics. He was a minor official who saw the capital Chang'an fall to rebels, and his lines, such as 'The state is broken, hills and rivers remain', record that disaster. About 1,000 poems of Li Bai and 1,400 of Du Fu survive. Both worked in the forms perfected in the Tang: the regulated verse (lushi) and the short quatrain (jueju).
They were not famous in the way they are now during their lives; Du Fu in particular rose in esteem during the Song dynasty, when critics ranked him first. The Complete Tang Poems, compiled in 1705, holds some 48,900 poems by more than 2,200 poets, and Three Hundred Tang Poems (c. 1763) is still a household book in China. A well-known legend says that Li Bai died by drowning when he tried to embrace the moon's reflection in a river; historians doubt it.
Why it mattered
- Their verse set the highest standard that later Chinese poets, such as the Song masters, measured themselves against.
- Du Fu's poems of the rebellion made poetry a form of historical witness.
- Tang poems became part of school education across East Asia, and shaped Japanese and Korean poetry.
- Translators from Ezra Pound to Kenneth Rexroth brought them into modern English poetry.
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