Libai and Dufu poetic

comparison!
PRESENTED TO: MAAM RASHIDA
PRESENTED BY: SARA AFZAL
BS AREA STUDIES 5TH SEMESTER
HISTORY OF CHINESE LITERATURE
 Background
• Li Bai, and Du Fu are considered the greatest poets of China's Tang dynasty (618–907). Both men
lived during the period later known as the High Tang, coinciding with the reign of Emperor
Xuanzong.
• The time of Li Bai and Du Fu was a turning point for the Tang Dynasty from grandeur to decline.
• Li Bai was eleven years older than Du Fu. These eleven years were a determining factor in the
different life paths and poetic styles of these two poets.
• Li Bai wrote most of his poems before the rebellion, reflecting the vigorous spirit of the Tang
Dynasty.
• Du Fu wrote many poems describing the destruction and people's misfortunes caused by the war.
• The poems by Li Bai and Du Fu represent the highest achievements in Chinese poetry; however,
they reflect very different philosophical inclinations.
• Li Bai was known as the Poet-Immortal, and Du Fu as the Poet-Sage, respectively symbolizing
Daoist, and Confucian approaches in their poems.
• Li Bai was characterized as the visionary, and Du Fu as the social conscience of the age.
• Li Bai's poems touch readers' hearts with rich imagination, extreme exaggeration, and vivid
metaphor, and are presented in a uniquely magnificent, untrammeled, and graceful style.
• Li Bai was deeply fond of the moon was because it symbolized eternity. And his fondness was
visible in many of his poem by how he glamourized it.
• While Du Fu was a deeply serious Confucian moralist, devoted to wife and family and official
duty
• “Du Fu represents the widest sympathy and the highest ethical principles” Literary
• Historians inform us that Du Fu was known as a “good Confucian,” animated by an “idealistic
humanitarian vision,”
• And was respected for his “unswerving loyalty to the government and unhesitating opposition
to rebellion”
• Li Bai, on the other hand, was a defiant social rebel, a bon vivant, a devil-may-care partier who
loved good wine far more than he loved Confucian precepts.
• Thus while Li Bai sings of how in “lovely wine /. . . together we’ll melt the sorrows of
all eternity”,
• Du Fu staggers under the weight of Confucian responsibility to properly order society:
“No sleep for me,” he writes in “Spending the Night in a Tower by the River,” “I worry
over battles. / I have no strength to right the universe”
• Li Bai, with his romanticized poetry about wine and nature along with his obstinate
behavior and carefree nature and Du Fu, with his realistic poetry about the struggles
of life and man.
• Dufu liked to write in a structured form of poetry that was called Lu Shi or regulated
poetry. The style has balancing couplets. While, Li Bai liked free-form poetry like a
more ancient style.
• As a poet, Li Bai often looked back to the past for inspiration. While, Dufu lived in the
present.
• Li Bai very rarely wrote about the future. The celebration of alcoholic beverages and a
drunken nomadic lifestyle was not the only reason that his work was considered to be
controversial.
 Poetic perception
Li Bai’s carefreeness is visible in his While Dufu’s worries reflect in his poem “My
poem “Bring in the Wine”: Thatched Roof Is Ruined by the Autumn
Wind,”
Bring in the wine! I have lived through upheavals and ruin
Keep the cups coming! and have seldom slept very well,
And I, I’ll sing you a song, But have no idea how I shall pass

You bend me your ears and listen— this night of soaking.

Oh, to own a mighty mansion
The bells and the drums, the tastiest morsels,
Of a hundred thousand rooms,
it’s not these that I love—
A great roof for the poorest gentlemen
All I want is to stay dead drunk
of all this world,
and never sober up.
a place to make them smile
Thank you