放翁と杜甫

Abstract

Lu Yu 陸游 (1125-1209), the famous patriot poet of the Southern Sung, admired Tu Fu above all the poets of the past, and the deep influence which Tu Fu exercised on him may be seen throughout his work. In spite of this fact, however, there are many differences which mark the lives and works of the two men. As a first step towards a comparative study of the two poets, the author has attempted to discover how Lu Yu evaluated his predecessor, using evidence found in Lu Yu's poems themselves. By Lu Yu's time, Tu Fu was already widely recognized as the greatest Chinese poet. It had become a popular pastime to try to identify individual poems of Tu Fu on the basis of isolated phrases or couplets, or to compose poems made up of clever imitations of various couplets of Tu Fu. But Lu Yu, unlike most of his contemporaries, was less attracted by Tu Fu's poetic technique than by his poetic spirit, and regarded the latter as the most valuable lesson to be learned. He insisted that it was Tu Fu the man rather than Tu Fu the poet, Tu Fu the patriot rather than Tu Fu the artist, who deserved to be most highly admired. This was the foundation upon which Lu Yu's evaluation of Tu Fu rested, and the premise upon which he approached his work.