Abstract
Abstract Studies on Tao Yuanming have often focused on his personality, reclusive life, and pastoral poetry. However, Tao’s extant oeuvre includes a large number of poems on history. This article aims to complement current scholarship by exploring his viewpoints on life through a close reading of his poems on history. His poems on history are a key to Tao’s perspectives with regard to the factors that decide a successful political career, the best way to cope with difficulties and frustrations, and the situations in which literati should withdraw from public life. Examining his positions reveals the connections between these different aspects. These poems express Tao’s perspectives on life, as informed by his historical predecessors and philosophical beliefs, and as developed through his own life experience and efforts at poetic composition.
Highlights
Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 [ca. 365–427], a native of Xunyang 潯陽, is one of the best-known and most-studied Chinese poets from before the Tang [618–907]. His extant corpus, comprising 125 poems and 12 prose works, is one of the few complete collections to survive from early medieval China, largely thanks to Xiao Tong 蕭統 [501–531], a prince of the Liang dynasty [502–557], who collected Tao’s works, wrote a preface, and
Tao’s pastoral poetry, his biography, and his reclusive lifestyle have received much attention from scholars using both traditional text-centered approaches and new approaches informed by manuscript culture, reception studies, and research into reading practices
Tao was not the first writer to discuss these problems, his innovation was to connect these different issues and to internalize and individualize principles drawn from the lives of the ancients, which he applied to his poetry and to his life. This innovation of practicing the values that he discussed in his yongshi shi in turn heightened the significance of these ancient figures
Summary
Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 [ca. 365–427], a native of Xunyang 潯陽 (contemporary Jiujiang 九江, Jiangxi), is one of the best-known and most-studied Chinese poets from before the Tang [618–907].
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