Du Fu (杜甫) Glossary
Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770) was a Tang-dynasty poet, later honoured as the Poet-Sage (詩聖) and often described as a poet-historian. The An Lushan Rebellion (安史之亂, 755–763) displaced him and his family and transformed the subjects of his poetry. Poems such as Spring View and the groups later known as the Three Officials and Three Farewells record war, conscription, hunger, separation, and the obligations of government through particular human lives. His reputation grew after his death until he became one of the central figures of the Chinese poetic canon.
The Dictionary extends that history into an editorial example. Prof. Langenkamp’s essay The Sincere Society describes Du Fu as writing about “the bodies on the road, the villages emptied, the families broken” while official culture still praised order and virtue. The sentence is an interpretive compression, not a claim that Du Fu alone recorded the rebellion. It identifies him as a model of writing that makes suffering visible when power prefers a more flattering account.
The essay pairs Du Fu with Han Yu (韓愈, 768–824), a later Tang essayist and a leading advocate of the Ancient Prose Movement (古文運動). Han Yu argued for prose modelled on earlier classical writing rather than the restrictive regularities of contemporary parallel prose. The pairing is the Dictionary’s own: Du Fu supplies the poetic example; Han Yu supplies the prose argument.
Sources
- Poetry Foundation, Du Fu: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tu-fu
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Du Fu: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Du-Fu
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chinese literature — Tang and Five Dynasties: https://www.britannica.com/art/Chinese-literature/Tang-and-Five-Dynasties-618-960
See also
- The Sincere Society — the essay tracing the tradition Du Fu represents
- Wu Jingzi — the Qing-era satirist who inherited the same problem
- Earned Parallelism — the Dictionary’s editorial practice of writing-against-form