This chapter and the next constitute a single project with two related purposes. Chapter 3 identifies a poetic criterion – a structural principle – by which to define a meaningful set of poems within Tu Fu's work, and Chapter 4 uses this set of poems to explore some connections between Tu Fu's poetry and his life. That there is an intimate connection between the poetry and the life seems the most obvious feature of his work: his poems, whatever else they do, manifestly provide a detailed chronicle of his life and of the historic events he had witnessed. The reader learns more about Tu Fu from his poetry than is possible for any poet up to his time. The relation of a poetry of such content to the life is intimate, direct, and informative to a degree unique to him.

The richness of this material has had a far-reaching effect on the focus of scholarship and hence on our present ability to approach the study of Tu Fu's poetry, including the tasks posed in this chapter. To reprise briefly, the tendency in scholarship has been for nearly all discussions of Tu Fu's poems to end up in biography. This tendency is understandable in view of the personal tone of his poems, but it has been unintentionally one-sided. The biographical inclination has been most notable in the grouping of the poems into categories for study. For reasons owing both to Tu Fu's poetry and to traditional perceptions of lyric poetry, the classifications have been primarily biographical. Consequently, critical analyses have been carried on within divisions created by biography rather than by poetry.