Collected Poems
If Li Bai is the romantic, Du Fu is the conscience. The poet of war, displacement, and social responsibility, his poems of the An Lushan Rebellion document historical catastrophe with an intimacy that hasn't been equaled. The Chinese call him "the poet-sage." His technical mastery of regulated verse is extraordinary; his humanity is even more so.
Regulated verse lives on tonal parallelism, paired couplets, and compressed allusion, none of which survives the trip into English; what arrives is often plainspoken sadness with the engineering stripped out. The corpus runs to nearly fifteen hundred surviving poems, many of them occasional verse about bureaucratic postings, and every line trails footnotes about Tang officialdom you will need.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
