TU MU

(803 to 853)

TU MU WAS born into a very wealthy and illustrious family presided over by his grandfather, who held no less a position than prime minister, and he spent his childhood in the most privileged of circumstances. The young Tu Mu spent much time at the lavish family estate in their ancestral village on the slopes of the Whole-South Mountains just south of the capital. There he moved in a world of natural beauty, political and literary celebrity, and seductive entertainments of beautiful courtesans, with their exquisite music and dance. But the family fortunes soon declined precipitously, and he spent much of his youth in relative poverty. In spite of this hardship, he somehow managed to gain the erudition required for government service. He had a relatively successful lifelong career, ever concerned with the people’s welfare, which led to many poems of social conscience, though they functioned more as official protests than as art. He also became something of an expert in military strategy, authoring the standard commentary on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Tu is popularly remembered as an aesthete devoted to wine and music and courtesan romance, interests mingled with a strong nostalgia for the splendors he had known when young. But there are not, in fact, all that many poems of this type in the Tu Mu corpus, and Tu was not necessarily proud of those that do exist: he excluded most of them when he assembled a collection of his work. They were only added to the collection later, and many may not be authentic.

Tu Mu’s work combines many influences, most notably Li Ho’s sensuous textures and the extreme distillations of poets such as Wang Wei. Tu’s most celebrated poems are short, rarely more than eight lines, and his quatrains are especially renowned for their clarity and concision, which grew out of the Ch’an (Zen) poetics that began with Meng Hao-jan and Wang Wei. His accomplishment was to add Li Ho’s sense of interiority and emotional atmospherics to the distilled imagism of these landscape poets. Tu cultivates the enigmas of history and landscape in images of striking clarity, often combined to create surprising shifts and startling juxtapositions that open new interior depths, and these depths open in turn the fundamental human enigmas of consciousness and mirrorlike perception, revealing their organic relationship to the rivers-and-mountains realm.