Tang poetry
During the Tang dynasty, poetry continued to be an important part of social life at all levels of society.
[2] The periodization scheme employed in this article is the one detailed by the Ming dynasty scholar Gao Bing (1350–1423) in the preface to his work Tangshi Pinhui, which has enjoyed broad acceptance since his time.
[3] This system, which unambiguously treats poetry composed during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (the "High Tang" period) as being superior in quality to what came before and after, is subjective and evaluative, and often does not reflect the realities of literary history.
[9] Many records of poetry, as well as other writings, were lost when the Tang capital of Changan was damaged by war in the eighth and ninth centuries, so that while more than 50,000 Tang poems survive (more than any earlier period in Chinese history), this still likely represents only a small portion of the poetry that was actually produced during the period.
[8] Many seventh-century poets are reported by the 721 imperial library catalog as having left behind massive volumes of poetry, of which only a tiny portion survives,[8] and there are notable gaps in the poetic œuvres of even Li Bo and Du Fu, the two most celebrated Tang poets.
By the time of the Tang dynasty, there was already a continuous Chinese body of poetry dating back for over a thousand years.
Thus, the genre may be divided into several major more-or-less chronological divisions, based on developmental stages or stylistic groupings (sometimes even on personal friendships between poets).
Li Bo's bold seizing of the old forms and turning them to new and contemporary purposes and Du Fu's development of the formal style of poetry, though hard to equal, and perhaps impossible to surpass, nevertheless provided a firm edifice on which the Middle Tang poets could build.
In the Late Tang (晚唐), similarly to how eventually the earlier duo of Li Bo and Du Fu came to be known by the combined name of Li-Du (李杜), so in the twilight of the Late Tang there was the duo of the Little Li-Du (小李杜), referring to Du Mu (803–852) and Li Shangyin (813–858).
Importantly for the history of poetry, Li survived another three years as a prisoner of the Song dynasty, and during this time composed some of his best known works.
[citation needed] Thus, including this "afterglow of the T'ang dynasty", the final date for the Tang Poetry era can be considered to be at the death of Li Yu, in 978.
[12] Surviving the turbulent decades of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era, Tang poetry was perhaps the major influence on the poetry of the Song dynasty, for example seeing such major poets as Su Shi creating new works based upon matching lines of Du Fu's.
Furthermore, in the Qing dynasty era the imperial civil service examinations the requirement to compose Tang style poetry was restored.
Part of an anthology by Cui Rong, the Zhuying ji also known as the Collection of Precious Glories has been found among the Dunhuang manuscripts, consisting of about one-fifth of the original, with fifty-five poems by thirteen men, first published in the reign of Wu Zetian (655–683).
Fletcher (1919) The first twenty characters translate literally as: Major translators of Tang poetry into English include Herbert Giles, L. Cranmer-Byng, Archie Barnes, Amy Lowell, Arthur Waley, Witter Bynner, A. C. Graham, Shigeyoshi Obata, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, David Hinton, Wai-lim Yip, Red Pine (Bill Porter), and Xian Mao.
Some popular Western adaptations of Tang poetry include songs like Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun".
Also important are the use of certain typical poetic forms, various common themes, and the surrounding social and natural milieu.
