Also known as T’ao Ch’ien and Tao Yuanming. Born: Into a poor family, in what is now Jiangxi province, China, 365 ad. Career: Became a government official in 393; held other minor posts, but retired to become a farmer in 405. About 120 poems are extant. Died: 427.
Publications
Collections
Tao Yuanming ji [Works], edited by Wang Yao. 1956; edited by Yang Yong, 1971.
Gleanings from T’ao Yuan-ming (Prose and Poetry), translated by Roland C. Fang. 1980.
Tao Yuanming ji [Works], edited by Lu Qinli. 1979.
T’ao Yuan-ming: His Works and Their Meaning, translated by A.R. Davis. 2 vols., 1983.
Selected Poems, translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. 1993.
Verse
Jingjie xiansheng ji (poetic works), edited by Tao Fu. 1883; revised edition, 1936; edited by Ku Chi, 1968.
T’ao the Hermit: Sixty Poems, translated by William Acker. 1952.
The Poems, translated by Lily Pao-hu Chang and Marjorie Sinclair. 1953.
The Poetry, translated by James Robert Hightower. 1970.
Selected Poems, translated by David Hinton. 1993.
Other
Taohua yuan ji [Tale of the Peach-Blossom Spring]. N.d. Wu liu xiansheng zhuan [The Gentleman of the Five Willows], N.d.
Critical Studies:
The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien, commentary and annotations by James Robert Hightower, 1970; T’ao Yuanming: His Works and their Meaning (commentary) by A.R. Davis, 2 vols., 1983; Tao Qian and the Chinese Poetic Tradition: The Quest for Cultural Identity by Charles Yimtze Kwong, 1994.
Like much of Chinese lyricism, Tao’s poetry is an expression of personal thoughts, feelings and experiences. It is thus important to remember that China’s most celebrated nature poet and hermit was also an ardent visionary forced by political and social ills to choose eremitism for the last 20 years of his life. Charting a lifelong quest for a personal and cultural identity, his work reveals a dialectic search for a social and natural ideal informed by Daoism and Confucianism, as they form an alternating existential current charging him with antipodal sentiments and impelling his shifting perspective on the cosmic principles directing his destiny. More importantly, these visions constitute a thematic macrostructure and a stylistic underpinning of his art, which stands in unity with his life and ideals. As the poet returned to an intrigue-free world of nature with his social aspirations frustrated but never extinguished, his writings, like the famous ”Yin jiu” [Drinking Wine] poems, continued to reflect the contrasting hues and intermingled tones of an artistic world that included not only portraits of nature, but also a poignant response to history, mortality and time.
Tao is best known for his ”farmstead poetry” (tianyuan shi), which has often been called ”pastoral.” Certainly some of his poems—especially those from the earlier years after his permanent withdrawal, like ”Guiqulai ci” (”Return Home”)—sing of the peacefulness of country dwelling, the harmony of domestic life, and of a return to nature that is also a return to the natural Way (Dao) and original human nature. Yet even these poems are far from being pastoral in that they are not conventional fabrications but born of husbandry experience; showing a balanced appreciation of the freedom and vulnerability of rural existence—from the delights of work and familial contentment to material privation and plaintive reflection, or even simple scenes—they are complete with the inclemencies of rusticity and a broad range of moods, featuring not aesthetic shepherds but real farmers worried about their crops. Besides, free from the rhetorical ambiguity in pastoral verse of a precious presentation of simplicity, Tao’s farmstead poetry is marked by plain, lucid language and a directly expressed voice. While objects like hills, birds, fish, pines and chrysanthemums are more readily identifiable as images, the line between image and object is often hard to draw where his language expresses quotidian experience, for it represents both the poet’s diction and the rustic’s life. Vibrant with a conversational vitality and immediacy sharply different from contemporary stylistic sophistication and verbal embellishment, his ”farmer’s words” (against which criticism has been levied) blend life and art into a crystalline beauty without heavy adornment. Both the concerns of his livelihood— concerns that constitute what, until then, was assumed to be ”unfitting” content for literati verse, and the ”inelegant” language of such concerns, which infuses his style—mark the literary and cultural originality of a poetry that records the totality of heartfelt experience.
At the same time, the combination of Tao’s earthy life and visionary sensibility means that his writings are at once symbolically charged and empirically rooted, wherein human and transcendental levels of meaning are intermingled. One finds his lyric voice imbuing all forms (poetic and narrative) and subjects (natural, historical, autobiographical, mythical, and fictional) that serve as his expressive medium, resulting in cross-fertilization among formal and generic types and an extension of the ambit of Chinese lyricism. Yet this symbolism is essentially not the coinage of elaborate exertion and self-conscious design but the lyrical outgrowth of an inner vision, spontaneously projected on, and authenticated by, its perceived objects as they constitute a permanent and universal macrostructure of values validating the truth of his convictions. Such visionary transfiguration of a fundamental realism produces an organic unity between the realistic and ideal, the subjective and objective, the finite and infinite, and the spiritual and material. It is what underlies the work of the first great Chinese poet of the mundane and humble, as he conveys the daily moods and concerns of ordinary rural life with a refreshing and resonant simplicity. Tao is the first to link successfully, in poetry, a natural symbolism to a cosmic frame of reference, and the first, therefore, to realize fully the potential that structure holds for lyric expression. If his poetry comes across with an unobtrusive symbolic force, it is not only because he speaks what he sees in nature but because nature embodies the substance that allows him to speak thus.
In the final analysis, the simplicity and seemingly effortless ease of Tao’s poetry are artistic attributes reflective of his own nature and determined by his ideals, its appeal lying in a unity between existential and aesthetic values. Poetry, for Tao, became witness and companion to his life, the sustaining mainstay of his idealism, and the fortifying inspiration that enabled him at times to attain a spiritual-aesthetic transcendence of his shattering historical reality. But beyond all this, poetry became a substitute fulfilment for his social responsibility as a literatus, a means of illuminating the natural and moral path amid his reclusion, and a way of preserving cultural ideals at a time when they seemed all but lost.
Virtually isolated in the political and artistic ethos of the day, Tao was largely left in oblivion for three centuries after his death before being recognized by the High Tang poets, and it was another three centuries before he was fully appreciated by the Song writers. It was at an unnoticed point that the Chinese lyric vision of nature came to maturity.
