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

that the “textual dream swallowed up the political reality” to agree with his conclusions about the essential relationship between the realm of language and text and the world of politics and political institutions. Indeed, there were successive waves of canon formation as the Chinese authority structure and conceptual world were negotiated and renegotiated in different historical circumstances.

The Tang dynasty in which Du lived was such a period, in which the intellectuals of the age were working to restore the authority of a common literary and cultural inheritance, an effort that only intensified in the period following the An Lushan Rebellion.¹³ As Anthony DeBlasi puts it, “The centerpiece of this approach was the assertion of the continuing validity of literary culture as the instrument for ordering the world.”¹⁴ Du’s poems from this time are products of this age and enterprise. By Du’s time, writers and scholars had been discussing literature in terms of a “return to the past” (from here on, fugu 復古) for two centuries.¹⁵ The late-sixth- to early-seventh-century literary critic and government minister Li E 李諤, one of the earliest to advocate the moral reform of literature, wrote his famous letter on the reform of literary style during the reign of the Emperor Wen 文帝 (r. 581–605) of the Sui 隨 dynasty (581–618). The letter extols the ages of antiquity, when the canonical books—the Shi jing 詩經, Shang shu 尚書, Li ji 禮記, and Yi jing 易經—formed the foundation of morality and culture. Literature reflected this: poets wrote to improve both the government and the governed. Li criticizes the succeeding generations during which these books were forgotten, and literature became frivolous and self-absorbed, causing a corresponding decline in culture and politics throughout the empire. Li’s argument amounts to a call for a return to the serious moral and political content of the culture and practice of antiquity, with the canonical books at its foundation.¹⁶ In the early Tang, Chen Zi’ang 臣子昂 (661–702), a major poet of the generation just prior to Du Fu, explicitly rejected what he believed was an excessive triviality of content and an overemphasis on beauty in the capital style and other poetic forms of the Southern Dynasties:¹⁷