Du Fu in the Poetry Standards (Shige 詩格) and the Origins of the Earliest Du Fu Commentary

This article explores the relation between the late Tang genre of poetry criticism known as shige 詩格 — poetry standards or poetry models — and the earliest interlinear commentary on the Tang poet Du Fu. Representative passages from surviving shige that explicate Du Fu couplets are examined. Eleventh-century commentators of Du Fu applied metaphorical correspondences between natural objects and human moral and political qualities, a major feature of shige exegesis, to formulate political interpretations of selected, enigmatic Du Fu poems. These interpretations accorded with Song literati, especially Qingli and Yuanyou period, notions of political culture. The article concludes that this process aided in the creation of an image of Du Fu that projects him forward toward the Song half of the Tang-Song transition, from an aristocratic to a literati society. However, much of his greatest poetry looks back in lament toward the vanished glories of the Tang aristocratic world.