He seeks after simplicity and its effects as a diver seeks
for sunken gold. In his poem called "The Little Rain",
which I have (perhaps somewhat rashly) attempted, there is
all the graciousness of fine rain falling upon sullen furrows,
which charms the world into spring. "The Recruiting Sergeant"
has the touch of grim desolation, which belongs inevitably to a country
plundered of its men and swept with the ruinous winds of rebellion.

Li Po gives us Watteau-like pictures of life in Ch`ang-an before the flight
of the Emperor. The younger poet paints, with the brush of Verestchagin,
the realism and horrors of civil war. In most of Tu Fu's work
there is an underlying sadness which appears continually,
sometimes in the vein that runs throughout the poem,
sometimes at the conclusion, and often at the summing up of all things.
Other poets have it, some more, some less, with the exception of those
who belong to the purely Taoist school. The reason is that the Chinese poet
is haunted. He is haunted by the vast shadow of a past without historians --
a past that is legendary, unmapped and unbounded, and yields, therefore,
Golcondas and golden lands innumerable to its bold adventurers.
He is haunted from out the crumbled palaces of vanished kings,
where "in the form of blue flames one sees spirits moving through
each dark recess." He is haunted by the traditional voices
of the old masters of his craft, and lastly, more than all,
by the dead women and men of his race, the ancestors that count
in the making of his composite soul and have their silent say
in every action, thought, and impulse of his life.