"Tu Fu's poems are very numerous; perhaps about 1,000 of them are worth preserving. In the art of stringing together allusions ancient and modern and in the skill of his versification in the regular metres he even excels Li Po. But such poems as the 'Pressgang,'[1] and such lines as
" ' At the Palace Gate, the smell of wine and meat;
Out in the road, one who has frozen to death '
form only a small proportion of his whole work."
The poet Yüan Chēn (779-831) wrote a famous essay comparing Li Po with Tu Fu.
"At this time," he says (i.e., at the time of Tu Fu), "Li Po from Shantung was also celebrated for his remarkable writings, and the names of these two were often coupled together. In my judgment, as regards impassioned vigour of style, freedom from conventional restraint, and skill in the mere description of exterior things, his ballads and songs are certainly worthy to rub shoulders with Fu. But in disposition of the several parts of a poem, in carrying the balance of rhyme and tone through a composition of several hundred or even in some cases of a thousand words, in grandeur of inspiration combined with harmonious rhythm and deep feeling, in emphasis of parallel clauses, in exclusion of the vulgar or modern—in all these qualities Li is not worthy to approach Fu's front hedge, let alone his inner chamber!"
"Subsequent writers," adds the "T'ang History" (the work in which this essay is preserved), "have agreed with Yüan Chēn."
Wang An-shih (1021-1086), the great reformer of the eleventh century, observes: "Li Po's style is swift, yet never careless; lively, yet never informal. But his intellectual outlook was low and sordid. In nine poems out of ten he deals with nothing but wine or women."
In the "Yü Yin Ts'ung Hua," Hu Tzŭ (circa 1120) says: "Wang An-shih, in enumerating China's four
- ↑ Giles, "Chinese Poetry," p. 90.
