Great Regulars: These lines of Tu Fu, who as [David] Hinton

writes is "generally described as the greatest of China's poets," offer a very pointed expression of the paradox that runs through Classical Chinese Poetry. It is impossible to be at the same time a poet and a sage, because the sage insists on withdrawal, inactivity, selflessness, and silence, while the poet lives by observation, creation, introspection, and speech. The poet who achieved enlightenment would not, and could not, still write poetry. Yet the significant fact, of course, is that all these poets did still write poetry--which is to say, the fact that they kept writing poetry is reason enough to doubt whether the great Chinese poets were quite so devoted to withdrawal and enlightenment as Hinton's philosophical introductions suggest. Self-abnegation was their trope, and perhaps even their ideal, but it was never their practice: they were too committed to perception and expression to desire a radical or permanent detachment.

from Adam Kirsch: Nextbook: The Reader: Disturbances of Peace

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