An Event at Court in 750

Successive generations of commentators on Du Fu's verse for the centuries since the Song dynasty have admired his ability to draw copiously from his literary heritage. Good reasons exist for Huang Tingjian's 黃庭堅 (1045–1105) well-known epigram that “There is not a single character [in his verse] that does not have a locus of origin” (無一處無來處). Commentators have demonstrated that Du Fu infused his verse with a deep familiarity with the history and literature of the Han period (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.), the classical empire. His copious references to Han figures, episodes, and literature of the Han became a feature of his early verse and remained so until his final poem.

Already by 751, Du Fu had referred to his interest in the great Han authors.Footnote ¹ But during the year before, in 750, a chance event at court led the emperor himself explicitly to endorse the special status of the Han in the official view of the past. Du Fu, then desperate for a literary office in the capital bureaucracy and closely monitoring court events, noted and exploited this incident. It enabled him the more eloquently to justify to the emperor in person his own, independent interest in the literary and historical heritage of the Han.

Long before 750, when this incident took place, Han histories and Han-period verse were already central to the education of every member of the educated elite. The Three Histories, the Shi ji 史記, Han shu 漢書, and Hou Han shu 後漢書, were included on official school syllabi, and each had imperially approved commentaries completed by scholars under Tang rule. Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581–645) was one of several early Tang scholars admired for his special expertise in the Han shu. His commentary provided a wide-ranging review of existing commentaries from both north and south China, notable for its informative caution over matters of the supernatural, place names, and genealogies. Approved commentaries for the Hou Han shu by the Crown Prince Li Xian 李賢 (655–684) and for the Shi ji by Sima Zhen 司馬貞 (679–732) and by Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (in 736) followed. A lively climate in the exegesis of the Three Histories prevailed.Footnote ² A late eighth-century collection of vignettes and reminiscences, the Fengshi wenjian ji 封氏聞見記, by Feng Yan 封演 (jinshi 756, d. c. 790), listed no fewer than seven titles of scholarly exegesis on the Three Histories.Footnote ³ Ignorance of the contents of the Han shu was treated with derision.Footnote ⁴ Court poets and scholars composed poems extolling the Han shu and Han emperors.Footnote ⁵ Eighth-century poets composed free-standing poems about the very Han-period figures to whom Du Fu was to include allusions. Du Fu would certainly have known of Liu Zhiji's 劉知幾 (661–721) Generalities on History (Shi tong 史通), which subjected the Shi ji and Han shu to critical review.Footnote ⁶ Alongside the Three Histories were other prestigious sources containing literature thought to be of Han origin. Foremost of these was the Wen xuan 文選, an anthology that enjoyed high status in the seventh and eighth centuries. One of the men whose writing Du Fu much admired, Li Yong 李邕 (678–747), who had encouraged him as a young writer, was the son of the leading Tang commentator to the Wen xuan, Li Shan 李善 (c. 630–689). Du Fu would also surely have known of the “Five Dynastic Servants” (wu chen 五臣), official scholars under Xuanzong (r. 712 to 756), whose Wen xuan commentary was approved in 718.Footnote ⁷ Du Fu frequently cited the monumental Han dynasty fu 賦 included in the Wen xuan, Han-era Music Bureau (yuefu 樂府) ballads, and early five-word ancient-style verse (gu shi 古詩) that were also important sanctions for his social and political perspectives. Not surprisingly, then, Du Fu measured his son's progress in education by his mastery of the Wen xuan.

Du Fu's coevals commanded a general knowledge of Han history and literature. One of Liu Zhiji's sons, Liu Zhi 秩 was, alongside Du Fu himself, a close client of the major rebellion period intellectual Fang Guan 房琯 (697–763).Footnote ⁸ Liu Zhi compiled a history of administrative institutions (now lost) that reached back to and included the Han. Another of Liu Zhiji's sons, Liu Kuang 貺, wrote a review of pre-Han and Han dynasty military policy toward the non-Chinese states entitled the Wu zhi 武指.Footnote ⁹ This analyzed the Eastern Han historian Ban Gu's 班固 (32–92) views and called the late Zhou policy toward the non-Chinese a “superior strategy” (shang ce 上策). Liu Kuang advocated radical separation between Chinese and “barbarian,” a view that was close to Du Fu's own outlook.Footnote ¹⁰ Du Fu's early manhood was a time when the regular annual examinations became ever more prestigious. In 735, under the major official scholar and litterateur Sun Ti 孫逖 (696–761), the topic for the fu composition in the Boxue hongci 博學宏詞 examination was: “Gongsun Hong Opens the Eastern Pavilion” (Gongsun Hong kai Dongge 公孫弘開東閣), a subject requiring intimate knowledge of Gongsun Hong's (d. 121 b.c.e.) biography within the context of Han history.Footnote ¹¹ Finally, in 735, the year before Du Fu's own jinshi failure under Sun Ti, Li Hua 李華 (715–774), a successful candidate and acknowledged essayist, extolled the Han dynasty as a period when court austerity had brought stability to the dynasty. An outspoken historian, Xiao Yingshi 蕭穎士 (717–760), successful in that same year, in writing to Wei Shu 韋述 (d. 757), the leading official historian of Xuanzong's reign, emphasized studying Han history: “What need is there,” he argued, “to mention Eastern Jin, Later Wei, Liang, Chen, [Later] Zhou, or Qi?”Footnote ¹²

The specific incident of 750 that led Du Fu explicitly to endorse Xuanzong's valorization of the Han involved both ritual and cosmological components, insofar as it concerned the emperor's approval of the correct succession of dynasties from the Zhou to the Tang. Integral to this sequence were two components: the patron Phase approved for each dynasty and its responsibility to honor the descendants of a limited number of its predecessor dynasties. At the climactic Feng and Shan rites offered on Mount Tai in 725, Xuanzong had confirmed that the dynasty's patron Phase was Earth (tu 土).Footnote ¹³ Then in 750, in a sealed memorial, a recluse Cui Chang 崔昌 brought the debate on the dynasty's patron Phase into the very center of the political struggle at court between the chief minister Li Linfu 李林甫 (d. 752) and his rival, Yang Guozhong 楊國忠 (d. 756). Cui Chang requested that the Tang dynasty's Earth Phase be seen as directly succeeding the Fire (huo 火) Phase assigned to Eastern Han, leap-frogging over the intervening dynasties, including the Sui, the imperial house from which Yang Guozhong was descended.Footnote ¹⁴ Cui's proposal thus implicitly involved reducing the ritual status of Yang Guozhong as a descendant of the Sui imperial house, thereby handing a victory for Li Linfu, who was said to have been delighted at delivering this blow to his rival's status. On receiving Cui Chang's proposal, Xuanzong called for general discussion. The decision might well have favored the status quo, but for the chance appearance of a group of four stars that night.Footnote ¹⁵ The delighted emperor confirmed the dynasty's patron Phase as Earth, and extolled the Han dynasty as the true precursor of the Tang. The Sui, the Yang clan, and with them Yang Guozhong, thus lost the supreme ritual status that henceforth only the canonical Zhou, exemplary Han, and current Tang dynasties could claim.

Du Fu himself was unlikely to have been pleased by the political success Xuanzong's decision gave to Li Linfu in his struggle against Yang Guozhong. In 747, Li had failed the entire cohort of candidates in a decree examination, with Du Fu among them.Footnote ¹⁶ From an “entreaty poem” (ganye shi 干謁詩) he wrote in 753, after Li's death, it is clear that he deeply resented Li for this injustice.Footnote ¹⁷ But Xuanzong's imperial endorsement of the Han-era model paradoxically benefited Du Fu, since it confirmed for him the status of the dynasty whose history and literature he already knew exceptionally well. In the three fu on grand court rituals that he presented to Xuanzong in 751, he referred not only to the recluse Cui Chang's memorial of the previous year but also praised Xuanzong for his decision. In the allusive court style of the time, his fu reiterated the argument that the regimes intervening between the Han and the Tang were “intercalary” and were therefore rightly demoted in status.Footnote ¹⁸

This incident highlights the debt to Han literary and historical sources that runs through Du Fu's entire oeuvre. But this same debt poses a challenge to any assessment of Du Fu's outlook. Du Fu's psychology was highly complex; he referred to his “hundred cares and thousand worries” (bai you qian lü) and stated that they were at war within him. His command of the literary tradition enabled him to adopt the identities of the personae who appeared in his literary heritage, chiefly, the Ru 儒 scholar qualified by education and moral standing to advise the emperor on issues of policy and conduct; the recluse forced by political conditions to reject office and live the morally unsullied life of rural seclusion; and finally, the creative poet, as master of a verse tradition that permitted him to convey not only an account of his own personal experiences but also broader comments on the political and moral state of the empire.

What part did Du Fu's command of Han history and literature play in his sense of these different identities? Was he primarily a political reformer, an aspiring recluse, or above all an innovative poet?Footnote ¹⁹ Put another way, do his many Han allusions contribute to an understanding of his true self, and so influence the assessment modern critics have of his overall approach to the past? Du Fu himself, in a poem of 769, provided guidance as to how his career and concerns should be understood. He referred to having been confronted by two choices, two levers (er bing 二柄), as he put it.Footnote ²⁰ Already at Kuizhou in 767, he had suggested that he was, above all, a poet and implied that poetry had become the main commitment of his life.Footnote ²¹ In turn, these three identities—scholar official, recluse, and poet—provide headings under which his use of Han sources may be considered. The Han period offered a more fertile field to Du Fu for the political aspect of his life experience and his enduring political aspirations. His allusions to Han political life are therefore treated in Part I of this essay. His Han allusions to his second lever, namely, his private experience, his self-identity as a recluse, farmer, and domestic figure, are treated in Part II. Lastly, and perhaps controversially, he found some sanction in Han sources for his increasing commitment to a self-identity as a poet, innovative and thoroughly eclectic, in tension with the more instrumental and moralistic approach to literature of some of his peers. His references to his literary stance therefore provide the subject matter of Part III of this essay.

Du Fu's allusions to Han sources are too numerous to account for individually without a full-length monograph. A preliminary survey therefore requires that the field of over fourteen hundred poems be delimited. The main points of focus for this article are three of Du Fu's long verse letters, his “extended lyrics,” a verse form that he played a significant role in developing. These long poems are the subcategory of his verse that is the freest to record his attitudes in its “stream of consciousness” mode. He wrote each of these three poems to inform his friends of his own state of mind, in the hope of keeping in effective contact with them. Supported by a number of his regulated poems (lü shi 律詩), yuefu, and ancient-style verse, these three poems, composed for fellow members of the elite, are foregrounded here, because they exemplify almost the full range of his allusions to the earlier empire.

Du Fu composed the first of these three verse letters in 759, during his brief, three-month stay at Qinzhou 秦州 (modern Gansu). This verse letter, entitled “Sent to the good Marshal Jia 賈, Sixth, of Yuezhou 岳州 and to the Minister Governor Yan 嚴 of Bazhou 巴州, in fifty rhymes” (hereafter Poem I), is addressed to two former colleagues who had served with him at Suzong's emergency court at Fengxiang 鳳翔, and subsequently at the restored court at Chang'an. Both Jia and Yan had reputations for literary ability, and both, in contrast to Du Fu himself, had continued in office following the expulsion from their capital posts in 759 that all three underwent.Footnote ²² The second verse letter dated to 767, titled “On an autumn day at Kuizhou headquarters singing of my concerns, respectfully sent to Director Zheng 鄭 [Shen 審] and Visitor Li 李 [Zhifang 之芳], in one hundred rhymes” (hereafter Poem II), is the longest poem in Du Fu's entire oeuvre, a pailü 排律 composition, written, as the title suggests, in Kuizhou, where he stayed for nearly two years, from 766 until 768, after fleeing from Chengdu.Footnote ²³ The recipients of Poem II were two former colleagues, both of whom—significantly for the argument of this article—Du Fu had long admired for their verse writing in the elite setting of the emperor Xuanzong's court, before the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion of 755.

Zheng Shen was a son of Zheng Yao 繇, an acclaimed court poet and client of the emperor's fourth brother Li Fan 李範, Prince of Qi 岐 (d. 726),Footnote ²⁴ who was moreover indirectly related by marriage to the imperial family. By 767, he had been expelled from the Directorship of the Imperial Library at Chang'an to be Vice-Governor of Jiangling 江陵 (Jingzhou 荊州) (modern Hubei).Footnote ²⁵ Li Zhifan was an imperial clansman, skilled at five-word verse, whom Du Fu had cast before the rebellion as one of his “mentors in letters” (ci bo 詞伯).Footnote ²⁶ After arduous service as a representative of the dynasty to the Tibetans, Li at the time held the post of Visitor to the Crown Prince, no more than a sinecure. Both men, now staying in the far south, had relative freedom from official duties. Separated by the perilous Yangtze Gorges, they had written to Du Fu, then up-river at Kuizhou, sympathizing with his poor health. It is clear that Du Fu, isolated at Kuizhou, planned in the spring of 768 to travel downstream to arrange a reunion with both men.Footnote ²⁷ Poem III, the final verse letter to be foregrounded here, is titled “Suffering from illness aboard my boat, propped on my pillow, I write of my concerns, in thirty-six rhymes, respectfully offered to my relatives and friends at the Hunan [headquarters].” Dated to the winter of 770, this letter, with its poignant sense of foreboding, is believed to be one of the last that Du Fu wrote.Footnote ²⁸ It is addressed to relatives and fellow members of the elite at Tanzhou 潭州, modern Changsha, as he journeyed northwards toward them by boat. Even at this late stage, Du Fu had not lost his ability to cite a range of early sources, presumably from memory. Han records form a good proportion of those.

When Du Fu made his countless direct verbal references to Han history or merely echoed the diction of Han sources or used anachronistic Han terminology, it is difficult to know whether he was drawing on an unusually capacious memory or had in hand the original Han texts or some of the many prompt books on literary composition available to eighth-century composers of verse.Footnote ²⁹

I. Du Fu as a Ru 儒 Scholar Citing Han Political Issues

By referring elliptically to Han events, Du Fu drew frequent parallels between political episodes in the Sui-Tang and the Qin-Han periods, just as Xuanzong had done in 750, to elevate the status of the reigning dynasty. In his fu for presentation to Xuanzong in 751, for example, he defined the brilliance of the Tang dynasty by using Han phrasing. He praised the Han founder Liu Bang 劉邦 (r. 202–195 b.c.e.), for resuming the paragon dynasties of the Xia, Yin, and Zhou, after the interval of the Qin.Footnote ³⁰ He described the dynasties that intervened between the Han and the Tang as derelict:

Du Fu also cited a song text, the “Da feng ge 大風歌,” the song of triumph and concern over the fate of the Han attributed to Liu Bang, the Han founder.Footnote ³²

Many of the characteristic references that follow throughout his oeuvre are to events in the Han narrated in the official sources, public rather than private episodes. In sum, they suggest the nature of Du Fu's overall vision of the Han polity. The majority of them typically involve his mentioning figures by name and citing the activity for which the Han histories extolled them. Thus in a poem of 763, he described the vanquishing of the “violent Sui” and the foundation of the Tang by Li Shimin 李世民 (r. 626–649): “[Our] Fen and Jin were [their] Feng and Pei” (汾為晉豐沛), meaning that the Tang base in Shaanxi was parallel to that of the Han in Henan. Zhang Jianfeng 張建封 (735–800), to whom Du Fu wrote the poem, had among his ancestors Liu Wenjing 劉文靜 (568–619) and Pei Ji 裴寂 (570–632), both early supporters of the Tang and both officeholders at Jinyang 晉陽. Accordingly, they were analogous to the early Han advisers Xiao He 蕭何 (d. 93 b.c.e.) and Cao Shen 曹參 (d. 190 b.c.e.), both men of Pei 沛.Footnote ³³ Here and elsewhere, Du Fu praised by name the imperial advisers who had set the guidelines for the Han state structure at the start of the dynasty, among them Xiao He and Shusun Tong 叔孫通 (fl. c. 195 b.c.e.).Footnote ³⁴

More rarely, however, his references relate to highly specific episodes of his own time. Here, two contrasting examples will suffice. In a poem of 754, he praised an elderly scholar, Shen Dongmei 沈東美, a son of Shen Quanqi 佺期 (c. 650–713), court poet and leading exponent of tonality in verse in Zhongzong's court, whom Du Fu admired. Shen Dongmei too had been recognized for his command of tonal rules. In his old age, he was appointed Supernumerary Secretary to the Board of Catering in the palace services. Du Fu equated him to the Western Han figure Feng Tang 馮唐, who had likewise been given high appointments late in life.Footnote ³⁵ In a poem of 763, he provided an encoded reference to Western Han history. When at Zizhou 梓州 and Langzhou 閬州 in Sichuan, he had heard that the newly ascended emperor Daizong 代宗 (r. 762–779) had considered fleeing the Tibetan incursion of 763 with the court south to Jiangling 江陵. Accordingly, two years before, in the ninth month of 760, Jiangling 江陵 or Jingzhou 荊州 had been designated the dynasty's “Southern Capital” (Nandu 南都), “in order to defend against attacks from Wu and Shu,” and there the troops from the Yongping 永平 army had been stationed.Footnote ³⁶ Du Fu himself at this stage planned to leave Sichuan for Jiangling, probably hoping to join Daizong's emergency court if the emperor decided to flee there. He therefore praised Jiangling as having the fine buildings needed for an imperial capital. He further suggested that, “Although King Mu of the Zhou did not turn aside here, / To the end, they expected Han Wudi to progress to here” (未枉周王駕 / 終期漢武巡), implying a move to Jiangling would have respectable precedents.Footnote ³⁷

Du Fu also often transposed Tang administrative or palace precinct names to their Han equivalents. He referred in 760 to the central precinct in the Tang capital, at which high officials discussed events, as the Yuntai 雲臺, for instance.Footnote ³⁸ When at Kuizhou in 766 he yearned to return to the capital and draft the great state documents, he named the Mingguang 明光 Palace, where documents had been composed under Han Wudi, as his object. He was, he suggested, prevented from doing so by his sickness to the lungs, here perhaps a reference to the same illness that visited his Han literary hero Sima Xiangru.Footnote ³⁹

II. Du Fu as a Recluse and the Han Precedents for Seclusion

Du Fu, the above analysis indicates, never fully relinquished his touch on his first “lever,” his aspiration to serve the Tang as an official. He longed to serve the dynasty in a literary capacity and recorded that he liked to discuss political and military issues until the end of his life. But that is only half the story: Du Fu was also a “supreme autobiographer,” and in referring to “hundred worries and thousand cares,” as he faced successive reverses in his career, he acknowledged the pull of seclusion in more complex psychological detail than did most of his contemporaries. Though his main source of precedents were the eccentrics of the Jin dynasty and the Period of Disunion, particularly the eccentric dissident Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–263) and the great Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (365–427), he also compulsively related this aspect of his life to precedents from the Han period.

It was, however, the Eastern Han figure Pang Degong 龐德公, who had shunned his local government offices and taken his family away to a permanent withdrawal, who was to be Du Fu's principal icon for the idea of radical seclusion.Footnote ¹³⁹ He made an early reference to Pang in the winter of 746. Du Fu had then hoped for a repeat meeting with Li Bai, and he specified Lumen 鹿門, where Pang is said to have retired, as the place where they should meet. This, his earliest reference to Pang, underlines that he wished to meet Li Bai away from the official world, from which he had turned to Li Bai for relief.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ But there were other Han and pre-Han precedents for extreme poverty or withdrawal. Seven years later, Du Fu's expulsion from the capital was followed his brief tenure from the eighth month of 758 to the seventh month of 759 as Administrator of Assessments (司功參軍) at Huazhou. His rank was eighth-degree, second class, and his duties there irked him.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In Poem I, he complained of his impoverished life at Huazhou and announced he was on the point of quitting office. To suggest the deprivation that surrounded him, he cited the Shi ji biography of one of Confucius's disciples, Yuan Xian 原憲, who had known poverty and had “perished in the marshlands” after Confucius's death.Footnote ¹⁴² He combined this with a reference to an Eastern Han scholar, Fu Qian 伏虔, or Fu Shen, known for his integrity and literary ability, who had accepted appointment as governor of Jiujiang, only to resign and, in a period of disorder, to take up traveling and die of sickness: “My pupils were as poor as Yuan Xian / The students, as old as Fu Qian” (弟子貧原憲 / 諸生老伏虔).Footnote ¹⁴³ After only nineteen months in office at Huazhou, Du Fu resigned and fled west with his family, to Qinzhou in modern Gansu. From this time on and over the long itinerary that followed, Du Fu made analysis of his withdrawal from official life a recurrent subtheme in his verse. His most significant allusions were then to post-Han figures. Tao Yuanming now became particularly significant, presumably because Tao's analysis of his own withdrawal was as ambivalent and complex as Du Fu's own and Tao's depiction of his children and rural activities formed a precedent for Du Fu's considerable amplification in his own verse of domestic themes. Notably, Tao was the only deceased literary exemplar whom Du Fu addressed in the second person.

But Du Fu also kept up a succession of references to himself and to his verse companions by citing Qin and Han exemplars of his own situation. He referred fifteen times to the “Four White-headed Elders” (Si hao 四皓) who withdrew from the political world at the end of Qin and later refused repeated invitations from Liu Bang, the Han founder, to serve his dynasty, only to intervene decisively in the matter of Gaozu's successor. He invoked these famous figures for different aspects of their lives: in a poem recollecting his pre-rebellion situation, he commended the Elders for their discussions, presumably about the imperial succession, their one recorded political intervention.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In Poem II, his reference to them in seclusion on Mount Shang 商 may be no more than an indirect reference to one of them as a precursor of Li Zhifang's sinecure tenure, as Visitor to the Crown Prince.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ He also used them as precursors to a genuine recluse he met at Kuizhou, when he anticipated a visit from him.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In two poems dated to 768, he commented again on them: in the first he expressed admiration for their resolute decision to remain in retirement. But in the second he commented that the fame they enjoyed was a constraint, preventing them from the radical withdrawal that should be the aspiration of a true recluse: “To command fame is not commendable / The Four White-headed Elders on Mount Shang were under pressure [not truly free]” (知名未足稱 / 侷促商山芝).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Here is an indication of the introspective strand in his perspective on withdrawal.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

It was, however, Pang Degong to whom he referred most consistently. Another early reference was in his prose vignette of 751.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In the crisis of 756, he regretted having failed to take his young son to Lumen, again away from the official world.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In 757, at a time of famine and hunger, he invoked Pang Degong, whose traditional retreat was located near Xiangyang 襄陽.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In 759, in a companion poem to Poem I, when considering what life choice to make, he observed that Pang Degong had chosen permanent withdrawal.Footnote ¹⁵² In 766, in a long poem recalling his pre-rebellion life, he ended by stating, “Pang Degong gave free rein to his inner nature, and led his sons away, to slumber on green moss.”Footnote ¹⁵³ In 770, a matter of days before he wrote Poem III, he ended a poem by expressing his intention of leaving Kuizhou for Lumen, in Xiangzhou, where Pang Degong lived in permanent withdrawal with his family.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

III. “I am the most accomplished of a family of poets”: On Du Fu and Han Literary Theory

Du Fu's numerous references to Han dynasty political and military events and his adaptation of Han verse traditions as a vehicle for his own social criticism, described in Part I above, suggest the depth of his interest in political and military issues and his special commitment to expressing sympathy for the victims of state oppression. His frequent references to Han recluses, the theme of Part II, also suggest that he drew solace from the Han precedents for withdrawal from official life, men like Pang Degong or the Four Whitehaired Ones. In these areas, his erudition was beyond doubt, but his political perspectives were largely those of his own time and not radically innovative. His outlook on one of the major Han contributions to Chinese critical theory, the Han exposition of the Odes classic, was, however, more ambivalent. Here, it is argued that he held this position in defiance of at least one of the more intensely moralistic and instrumental perspectives on literature that gained strength among his contemporaries in the post-rebellion decade.

This trend in literary criticism had its origins in the Tianbao period, but in the aftermath of the An Lushan rebellion gained greater momentum. It involved a renewed emphasis on verse as a vehicle for moral seriousness and an instrument the purpose of which was explicitly to serve the state and reform society. A number of critics now opposed technical virtuosity and excessive concentration on the formal requirements of the shorter genres of verse. They revived the ideal that verse registered the condition of the people, the concept that poetry had its roots in the canonical Odes and in Han expositions of it. Eighth-century men of letters generally accepted this reading of the Odes as having a monitory function and being integral to a cosmic dynamic. But some critics from the Tianbao period on were more insistent that verse ideally should be austere and morally serious than had been the case in the pre-rebellion decades. Led by the pioneering remarks of Chen Zi'ang 陳子昂 (661–702), Yuan Jie, Li Hua, and even the maverick Li Bai condemned the literature of the Period of Disunion, especially that of the late southern courts. Li Hua queried whether literature should amount to no more than a matter of “making metaphors of objects and bring sounds into harmony.” (豈唯比物諧聲為文章而已).Footnote ¹⁶³ Du Fu's long term friend Jia Zhi, criticizing the obsession with tonality in the jinshi degree condemned those who “when examining compositions considered tonal faults to be matters of right and wrong, and selected only the facile and alluring.”(考文者以聲病為是非，唯擇浮艷).Footnote ¹⁶⁴ One of Du Fu's contemporaries, Dugu Ji 獨孤及 (725–777), like Du Fu himself a client of Su Yuanming at Chang'an, specifically criticized an obsession with tonal rules, condemning those who “take the eight faults and the four tones to be manacles and inexorably maintain them as if honoring laws” (以四聲八病為梏拲, 拳拳守之如奉法).Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Where did Du Fu in his later years stand in relation to this more intensely instrumental view of the function of literature? It is difficult to be certain. After all, these new currents in literary criticism developed either at Chang'an or in dispersed communities probably remote from Du Fu, whether he was at Qinzhou, Chengdu, Kuizhou or Jingzhou or Tanzhou. But there is evidence that his eclectic position contrasted markedly with those of austere critics like Dugu Ji, Li Hua, and others, despite the fact that, like him, they had been clients of Su Yuanming. Above all, in his own verse Du Fu continued to “[strive] for striking effects and took considerable pride in the refinements of his craftsmanship.” His commitment to innovation and complexity of diction were increased, rather than diminished, by his isolation at Kuizhou.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

This understanding of his critical position is based first partly on the determined eclecticism of his survey of the history of verse history from early times, in contrast with the views of Dugu Ji and others. Secondly, he seems to have been reluctant explicitly to foreground the view of literature, and the Odes classic in particular, as expressions of discontent toward the ruler. Thirdly, even in the remote south, he resolutely kept up contact through verse letters and messages with his friends from pre-rebellion times who had been court poets and masters of tonality in verse. But Du Fu did not state this position either systematically or polemically. He indicated this attitude only randomly, and even apologetically, in his social verse.

The antique notion that the Odes classic had a largely impersonal monitory and satirical function when presented to the emperor or high authority, coupled with the kindred ideal that popular songs should be collected and presented to the ruler had survived as a subtheme in Tang official rhetoric. This ideal had been mentioned in connection with the climactic celebration of the Feng and Shan rites on Mount Tai in 725. Zhang Jiuling, whom Du Fu admired, had endorsed it, when he wrote, “The Odes have the function of expressing resentment and criticism, while the Li Sao has a text that is mournful and yearning” (詩有怨刺之作 / 騷有愁思之文). By this reading, the Odes classic delivered indirect advice (feng 諷) as the outcome of an impersonal process, whereas the Chu ci, on the other hand, expressed individuals’ grief. Later, Du Fu himself, by praising the emperor's performance at the Ancestral Temple in his fu of 751, made the same bow to political rhetoric. He commended Xuanzong's exemplary rule, saying, “The emperor was just then gathering the ditties of the common [people]” (上方采俗之謠).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In Sichuan in 762, concerned abjectly to flatter his patron Yan Wu, Du Fu suggested that “the people of the prefectures under your command sing songs of regret [at your leaving for the court]” (列郡謳歌惜).Footnote ¹⁶⁸ But these were expedient bows in the direction of the canonical theory and of political rhetoric, rather than serious appeals to the Han theory of verse. Du Fu also made the allusions to Han dynasty popular ditties set in official narratives, instanced above. Such ditties were seen, in Martin Kern's words, as “a cosmological exposition on the production of poetry that indeed showed the author as not in control of his text, and hence as speaking a truth that cannot be questioned.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ But again, for Du Fu these were as much examples of his erudition and skill in adapting ancient texts as they were serious evocations of the original, Han-era understanding of these texts. Rather, Du Fu refrained from suggesting explicitly that his own verse should be presented to the emperor as an impersonal expression of misgovernment. He did not surrender control of his texts or suggest that they were manifestations of an impersonal process. Nor did he repeat the frequently cited nostrum from the Odes classic that the ruler should “listen to the words of truth spoken by grass cutters” (xun yu churao 詢于芻蕘), as not only Gao Shi but even military men had advised.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ He also refrained from citing other statements relating to this instrumental position, that verse “expressed the feeling of those below” (達下情). Surely Du Fu's silence here amounts to his offering an apology for his own voice. He saw his own verse, even when it adapted Han popular ditties, as his own creation or creative adaptation, evidence of his own erudition, versatility, and wit.

There is one instance from which it is misleadingly inferred that Du Fu saw his own verse as an expression of an impersonal force, beyond his control. The last couplet of his Kuizhou poem “Evening Sunshine” (返照) should be translated, “One should not stay on [here] longer amid this chaos of jackals and tigers / In the Southern Quarter [Jingzhou, the southern capital], in actual fact, there are souls yet to be summoned [back to my company]” (不可久留豺狼虎亂 / 南方實有未招魂). This is surely not a reference to the souls of the dead or to the theory of verse as an expression of cosmic forces. Rather, it is an endorsement of Du Fu's plan to meet his verse companions Xue Ju, Meng Yunqing, Li Zhifang, and Zheng Shen downriver in Jingzhou, with whom he yearned to resume discussions on literature. Du Fu uses the expression zhao hun some ten times, and in most instances, he is clearly referring to people still living, not the dead.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Du Fu was conventional in extolling the great Han fu writers, men like Jia Yi, Sima Xiangru, and Yang Xiong. In the mid-eighth century, these men were universally praised. But when it came to the post-Han period, he differed from the post-rebellion critics, like Li Hua, Dugu Ji and others, whose position promoting a more strictly moralistic and instrumental view of literature has been outlined above. Where his contemporaries, clients of Su Yuanming, and probably Su Yuanming himself,Footnote ¹⁷² tended to follow convention when delivering their judgments on literary history in formal prefaces to literary anthologies (wenji xu 文集序) or other commemorative compositions, Du Fu gave his judgments, often quite informally, in poems across the range of his subcategories. His most famous overview was his series of six regulated quatrains poems reevaluating, “in jest,” past verse writers (戲為六絕句).Footnote ¹⁷³ In this series, he reached back deep into verse history to acknowledge Song Yu 宋玉 (c. 298–264 b.c.e.) and Qu Yuan 屈原 (c. 340–c. 278 b.c.e.) as the first figures in the literary tradition. Elsewhere, he implicitly accepted the opinion of his friend Meng Yunqing 孟雲卿 (c. 725–after 766) that five-word verse had started with Su Wu 蘇武 (140–60 b.c.e.) and Li Ling 李陵 (d. 74 b.c.e.) in Western Han.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Cumulatively, his review of the history of verse then ran through the Wei, Jin, and Period of Disunion. He saw merit in writers of all periods, including figures now considered obscure. His commendation of Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 (c. 656–c. 714) and Song Zhiwen 宋之問 (c. 656–c. 712), icons for the intense interest in the tonality of the shorter verse forms in the early eighth century, contrasts strongly with Dugu Ji's condemnation of obsession with tonality. He himself admired expertise in tonal patterning in others and saw how it had led, in Xuanzong's reign, to imperial recognition.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Up to and beyond his Kuizhou period, and especially later in his life, he proudly defended his own sustained interest in tonality: “In my late years I have steadily become [committed to] the fine details of the [tonal] rules of verse” (晚節漸於詩律細).Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Du Fu at Kuizhou, deprived of the company of fellow verse writers, yearned to brave the lawless Yangtze Gorges and sail down to Jingzhou, there to renew in person his contacts with verse writers from the pre-rebellion period, in order, in his own words, “to discuss literature.” If it is accepted that the trend toward condemning obsession with tonal rules that Dugu Ji expressed may have reached him in Kuizhou, it is not surprising that he was eager to debate or defend his own position. He had after all only just completed his masterpiece, the “Autumn Meditations” (秋興八首), in which his innovation in tonality had reached new levels of complexity. The recipients of Poem II, Zheng Shen and Li Zhifang, were on his mind, as were two others, Meng Yunqing and Xue Ju (薛據, c. 701–c. 767). Zheng was the son of a court poet and himself a court poet and an acclaimed master of tonality in verse. Before the rebellion, Du Fu himself had praised him for his court performance. In a tribute to him on the very eve of the rebellion, he had extolled him for “tones so accurate that the ghosts and spirits were startled” (律中鬼神驚). This rare instance of such hyperbolic praise for another man's verse Du Fu had adapted as an image from the “Great Preface” to the Mao Odes (Mao shi da xu), and he paralleled it only in one other instance, in praising the verse of his great hero Li Bai.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Du Fu's contemporary Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 (709–784), himself a phonologist, had also singled out Zhen's court performance for its mastery of tones.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Now, a dozen years later, Du Fu still recalled with pleasure Zheng Shen's achievement in Xuanzong's court setting. He compared both Zheng and Li Zhifang to the court verse writers Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen for their contribution in refining the tonal rules for lü shi 律詩 and jueju 絕句 and suggested that they were continuing this tradition. Li Zhifang too, as mentioned above, had been recommended before the rebellion by the imperial clan for his five-word verse, and Du Fu had considered him his mentor. Yuan Jie in 766 claimed Meng Yunqing as a friend in literature for close to twenty years (詞學相友，幾二十年). But Meng, a writer of sardonic poems and a literary critic with whom Du Fu discussed the origin of five-word verse, was also a long-term friend of Du Fu. Meng had written a treatise, “A Variant Discussion on Tonal Rules” (格律異議) (now lost), whose title suggests an opinion on the balance between tonality and content.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Xue Ju was another long-term friend, whose verse Du Fu also praised in a separate verse letter from Kuizhou.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ His verse was said, even before the rebellion, to be “unequivocally candid” (gugeng 骨鯁) and “very profound in its resentment and anger” (yuanfen po shen 怨憤頗深).Footnote ¹⁸¹ It may be relevant also that Dugu Mian 獨孤愐, Dugu Ji's brother or cousin, was serving as a prefectural governor further up the Xiang river at about this time.Footnote ¹⁸² Perhaps Du Fu had identified a small community of verse writers at Jiangling whom he might call to drink together and debate his masterpiece. He would surely have wanted to defend his own eclecticism, his sustained interest in tonality, and his interest in technical innovation.Footnote ¹⁸³

Du Fu, finally, even transposed his praise for Zheng Shen's and Li Zhifang's mastery of tonal rules to early sources, believed to be of Han origin. His appeals to early history to justify tonality in verse were of course ahistorical and unfounded. It is well known that awareness of tonality among Chinese scholars was the outcome of contact between Chinese and Sanskrit in the second phase of transcultural relations with Buddhism, long after the Han dynasty. Yet, referring to a Han shu passage, Du Fu praised Zheng and Li by stating in Poem II: “Your tones are comparable to the bamboo cut from Mount Kunlun. / The notes you strike inform one of the damp or dryness of the strings” (律比崑崙竹 / 音知燥濕弦). His reference is to a passage in Han shu Lüli zhi 律曆志, which states that Huangdi sent Ling Lun 泠綸 to mount Kunlun 崑崙 to locate bamboos that would strike the true Huangzhong 黃鐘 note.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Then, at Tanzhou in 769, Du Fu again praised Song Zhiwen on seeing a poem Song had written on a Buddhist monastery, with Du Fu even echoing Song's diction in his own poem.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Finally, in Poem III, Du Fu repeated the reference to idealized tonality by referring again to the Han shu, but giving it a more personal twist. Huangdi, here called Xuanyuan 軒轅 had, he said, ceased to regulate the pitch pipes and Shun 舜 had rested his zither. He went on to suggest that his own verse recorded his longing to return north by citing two figures whose exile music expressed for him his own nostalgia: “It is as if I was hearing the flute of Ma Rong / Or leant on the bosom of Zhongxuan [Wang Can]” (如聞馬融笛，若倚仲宣襟). Du Fu owed a special debt to Wang Can for his description of the hardships of travel.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ But Ma Rong's 馬融 (79–166 c.e.) introduction to a fu on the “Long Flute” (長笛賦) specifically expressed love of numerology and of tonal rules: “I thoroughly investigated schedules and techniques, / And also by nature loved notes and tones” (經核數術 / 又性好音律).

The cumulative implication of all these references to tonality in verse is that Du Fu never relinquished his strong interest in a feature that had dominated the court verse of Xuanzong's reign. Indeed, his “Autumn Meditations” was an encomium for the wealth, splendor, and sophistication of Xuanzong's court in contrast to his own deprivation at Kuizhou. Moreover, it was by an appeal to Han sources that Du Fu justified his continued interest in tonality. In other words, he surely could not have agreed with Dugu Ji's condemnation of excessive adherence to the “four tones and eight faults.” Du Fu advocated the freedom of the individual voice to be independent, to survey the entire history of Chinese verse and to make choices irrespective of current trends about literature, or about political conformity, to appreciate and draw from the court verse of the early eighth century, as well as from other periods.

This position relates well not only to the fact that Du Fu produced his masterpiece at Kuizhou, but also to some of his other, famous formulations about verse and its psychological origin. His position was expressionistic: verse was the outcome of an individual's erudition, “wearing out / exceeding ten thousand scrolls.” Its accurate appreciation was the exercise of the individual's heart, not the assessment of a bureaucratic state or of assessment according to an absolute moral code. What discussions he and his verse friends eventually may have had in Jiangling are of course unknown. An inference is that the reunions he so longed for were anticlimactic. But of one theme it is possible to be certain: Du Fu liked to acknowledge his “teachers” (wu shi 吾師). He adapted a reference in the Zuozhuan made originally to politics (zheng shi 政事) but made it apply to social drinking and, above all to verse.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Zheng Qian had been his teacher for drinking, but otherwise his teachers taught him verse. In 761, he advocated having “many teachers” drawn from the long tradition of Chinese verse (轉益多師是汝師).Footnote ¹⁸⁸ He cited Meng Yunqing for having Su Wu and Li Ling as his teachers. Finally, again for himself, he acknowledged Song Yu: “As the leaves fall, I deeply appreciate the melancholy of Song Yu, / In his fine style and classical excellence he is my teacher” (搖落深知宋玉悲 / 風流儒雅亦吾師).Footnote ¹⁸⁹ For Du Fu, it was the ancient masters of poetry, rather than politics, from whom he aspired to learn.

Perhaps Du Fu's continued interest in tonality and prosodic rules may explain why, self-deprecating about so many aspects of his life, he denigrated his own poetry. In a poem of 766 from Kuizhou, he suggested, “[My] literary corpus represents no more than a petty skill / Compared with the [true] Way, it falls short of honor” (文章一小技 / 於道未為尊),Footnote ¹⁹⁰ and in Poem II referring to his own verse, “I have received your reminiscences of my ‘carvings of worms’ (diaochong 彫蟲), and by a cooked carp you asked about my long illnesses” (蕭疏蒙記憶，烹鯉問沈綿). But again, this reference to the “carving of worms” was a self-critical term that originated in the Han poet Yang Xiong's disparaging description of his own ornate writing as a young man.Footnote ¹⁹¹ This may have been Du Fu's late concession that his interest in tonality was out of fashion in the demoralized atmosphere of the immediate post-rebellion period. Still, such self-effacing inconsistencies were persistent features of Du Fu's style: he was forever troubled by “his hundred worries and ten thousand cares.”