The Selected Poems of Tu Fu

Tu Fu (712–770 C. E.) has for more than a millennium been widely considered by the Chinese to be their greatest poet, and Hinton’s originalSelected Poems played a key role in extending that reputation to America. Most of Tu Fu’s best work was written in the last decade of his life as he fled the devastation of civil war. In the midst of his refugee struggles, Tu Fu’s always personal poems managed to encompass a remarkable range: elegant simplicity and great complexity, everyday life and grand historical drama, private philosophical depth and social engagement in a world consumed by war. Through it all, his wisdom grew only more elemental: “Armies haunt my homeland still, and war / drums throb in this far-off place. A guest // overnight here in this river city, I return / again to shrieking crows, my old friends.”