Confucian Prophet: Political Thought In Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) ...

Du Fu’s poetry is passionate in essence. It is passionate because he always cherished as a political thought an idea of a reform of reality, which came of course from his ideal of harmonious coexistence of every entity. His emphatic words are free from crudeness or harshness. They are always elaborate. This is because he scrutinized the facts of human life and of nature to the most salient details, pondered over what he discovered, and employed exact diction in expressing them.³⁰

Eva Shan Chou sees similar characteristics in Du’s poetry. She emphasizes his “acute sense of everyday life, very physical and concrete in its expression,” and concludes that Du Fu “creates, seemingly artlessly and without self-consciousness, a life whose physical reality is easily recognized. This is especially true in his relations with his humble neighbors and with his family.” Chou further notes that Du “describes specific, individualized moments in terms of physical actions and shows a keen sense of the rhythm and timing of such actions.”³¹ This type of realism combines what C. S. Lewis would call realism of presentation—“the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail”—with realism of content, realism that is “probable or true to life.”³² Du Fu’s presentation is utterly real in that minute detail and sharp observation are clearly evident. Du’s realism goes beyond these forms to encompass as well the historical realism of the chronicle. Much of his poetry is historically real in that it is concerned with the actual people and events of his day. The Song dynasty critic Ye Mengde 葉夢得 (1077–1148), in his Shilin shihua 石林詩話 for instance, likens Du’s writing to the Han historian Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (145–86 BC) Historical Records 史記.³³ This is the basis of many of the major Western and modern Chinese studies of Du Fu, including those by A. R. Davis, William Hung, and Chen Yixin, all of whom use Du’s poetry to construct “life and times” accounts of Du’s biography and the history of the dynasty during his life.³⁴ These features of his poetics naturally lead to a historical-biographical approach to Du’s political thought.