| Abstract |
From the perspectives of “poetry-history” and “to explain Du from his own poetry,” commentators believe that Du Fu’s poetry is more reliable than the Old and New Books of Tang. According to his poetry, one can reconstruct Du’s life and his background, which fully reflects the political and social situation before and after An Shi Rebellion. This paper attempts to examine the key concepts of the biography, and to re-evaluate the study of biographies of Du Fu by analyzing three modern biographies, re-reading the official records and investigating Du Fu’s autobiographical poetry. In “the Great Journey,” the poet concludes himself as “eccentric,” “unrestrained,” and failure in career; in the official biographies of the two Books of Tang, although the sources are dubious, an image of an unrestrained man of letters, the same as that in his autobiographical writing, is exhibited. Due to the different writing backgrounds and the various needs of readers, modern biographical writers have discovered different faces of Du Fu from the same works. This paper suggests that the picture of “eccentric,” “unrestrained” and “miserable” should be the primary portrait of a biography of Du Fu.
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