Tang China’s poet-sage left nearly fifteen hundred poems
Du Fu (712–770) failed the imperial exams, briefly held a minor court post, then watched the An Lushan rebellion shatter his career and family life. Later critics called him Poet-Historian and Poet-Sage. Nearly fifteen hundred attributed poems still shape Chinese and Japanese literary memory.
Born near Luoyang around 712 into a scholarly line that included poet-politician Du Shenyan, Du Fu trained on Confucian classics for civil service. He claimed teenage verse now lost. Around 735 he sat the exam in Chang’an and failed—Hung blames dense prose; Chou suspects weak patronage. He later met Li Bai in 744, forming a lopsided friendship with an already famous older poet. His mother died soon after his birth, so an aunt helped raise him, and an elder brother died young. Although his exact birthplace is unknown, Gong county being the favourite guess, he came to regard Chang'an, the Du clan's ancestral seat, as home.
A second exam in 747 failed every candidate after the prime minister blocked rivals. Du Fu petitioned the emperor in the early 750s, married around 752, and in 755 finally received a registrar post in the Crown Prince’s palace—only for the An Lushan rebellion to erase it before he could begin. Displacement through Qinzhou, Chengdu, and the middle Yangtze filled the later poems with war, bureaucracy, and domestic detail.
Traditional critics read Chinese poems through the author’s moral life, which Burton Watson tied to links between art and ethics; Du Fu’s historical and ethical focus made that method especially natural. William Hung noted how terse Chinese verse omits context readers must recover from biography. He died in 770; place and cause remain disputed, yet the Poet-Sage label stuck. Stephen Owen adds that the sheer range of Du Fu's work demands reading his whole life rather than filing him under one narrow label.
Source: Du Fu
