Collected Poems
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A failed official watching the state come apart develops a plain, exact style adequate to conscription, famine and flight, and is later called the poet-historian for it.
- public catastrophe recorded through particular domestic detail
- strict regulated form used to contain intractable material
- the poet's own failure and hunger admitted into the poem
- a reputation established generations after the poet's death
About fourteen hundred poems survive. The early work is ambitious court verse; the poems after the An Lushan rebellion of 755 are what secured his standing, recording requisitioned villages, an old man conscripted, a wife left behind, the poet's own hunger and his child's death, in regulated forms handled with unusual technical strictness. The compression is the point: the fixed line and parallel couplet hold material that would otherwise be unbearable. His reputation rose long after his death and has not fallen since.
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