Five Willows Literary Review

Poetry Fiction Memoir Essay Vignette other tidbits

Tao Yuanming (365–427), also known as Tao Qian, courtesy nameYuanliang (元亮), was a Chinese poet and politician. He was one of the best-known poets who lived during the Six Dynasties period. Tao Yuanming spent much of his life in reclusion, living in the countryside, farming, reading, drinking wine, receiving the occasional guest, and writing poems in which he reflected on the pleasures and difficulties of life and his decision to withdraw from civil service. Tao’s simple and direct style was somewhat at odds with the norms for literary writing in his time.^[1] In the Tang dynasty, he was well known as a recluse. During the Northern Song dynasty, influential literati figures such as Su Shi declared him a paragon of authenticity and spontaneity in poetry, predicting that he would achieve lasting literary fame.^[2] But Tao’s inclusion in the 6th-century literary anthology Wen Xuan implies he began to gain fame in his own era, at least in his birth area. Tao is now regarded as the foremost representative of Fields and Gardens poetry. He found inspiration in the beauty and serenity of the natural world. He is depicted in Jin Guliang’s Wu Shuang Pu.