Tang Era Poetry

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss two of China’s greatest poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, who wrote in the 8th century in the Tang Era. Li Bai (701-762AD) is known for personal poems, many of them about drinking wine, and for finding the enjoyment in life. Du Fu (712-770AD), a few years younger, is more of an everyman, writing in the upheaval of the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763AD). Together they have been a central part of Chinese culture for over a millennium, reflecting the balance between the individual and the public life, and one sign of their enduring appeal is that there is rarely agreement on which of them is the greater.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Tim Barrett 8 episodes
  Professor Emeritus of East Asian History at SOAS, University of London
• Tian Yuan Tan No other episodes
  Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at University College
• Frances Wood 10 episodes
  Former Curator of the Chinese Collections at the British Library

Reading list

• A Little Primer of Tu Fu
  David Hawkes (Clarendon Press, 1967) Google Books →
• Poems of Hanshan
  Peter Hobson (trans.) (Yale University Press, 2010)
• Studies in Medieval Taoism and the Poetry of Li Po
  Paul W. Kroll (Ashgate Publishing, 2009) Google Books →
• Cathay: Ezra Pound's Orient
  Ira Nadel (Penguin, 2016) Google Books →
• The Poetry of Du Fu
  Stephen Owen (trans.) (De Gruyter Mouton, 2016) Google Books →
• Poems
  Li Po and Tu Fu (trans. Arthur Cooper) (Penguin, 1973) Google Books →
• Bright Moon, Perching Bird: Poems by Li Po and Tu Fu
  Jerome P. Seaton and James Cryer (Wesleyan University Press, 1987)
• Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception
  Paula M. Varsano (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003) Google Books →
• The Life and Times of Po Chu-i
  Arthur Waley (Allen & Unwin, 1949) Google Books →
• The Poetry and Career of Li Po
  Arthur Waley (Allen and Unwin, 1950) Google Books →
• 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
  Eliot Weinberger (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  
  27 Jun, 2013 950 History of Asia
• Catullus
  
  9 Jan, 2020 870 Latin and Italic literatures
• Daoism
  
  16 Dec, 2010 290 Other religions
• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• Li Shizhen
  
  28 Nov, 2019 610 Medicine and health
• Horace
  
  15 Nov, 2018 870 Latin and Italic literatures
• Lyrical Ballads
  
  8 Mar, 2012 820 English and Old English literatures
• Robert Burns
  
  24 Oct, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Confucius
  
  1 Nov, 2001 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Rumi’s Poetry
  
  11 Feb, 2016 890 Other literatures

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: m00174d0

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00174d0

Auto-category: 895.1 (Chinese poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, two of China's greatest poets date from the 8th century in the Tang Era and they're Li Bai and Lu Fu.