Tao Yuanming

Tao Yuanming (陶渊明) or Tao Qian (陶潜) (* 365, according to other sources 372, † 427 ), also called Master of the five pastures (五柳先生), was a famous Chinese poet during the Eastern Jin Dynasty.

Life

Tao Yuanming 365 was born as the son of an impoverished family of officers. Little is known about his youth; 393 he took a subordinate post in the district administration of Pengze. Because of the arrogance of some of his boss aristocrats he retired two years later, at thirty, on his estate back to drive there agriculture.

399 he entered the service of the provincial governor Huan Xuan, who distinguished himself especially by his crackdown in the suppression of peasant uprisings. Not least because Tao soon ran into the camp of Huan's ultimately victorious opponent, Liu Xu, over. After working for a while Liu, Tao eventually moved to 405, disgusted by falsehood and corruption, again, this time forever, to his estate back. He surrounded himself with select friends, including Buddhists and Taoists, and devoted himself to literature.

A special passion Tao Yuanming cherished how many great Chinese poet, for intoxicating drinks. This led him, during a brief interlude in the office to completely replant the community field with rice liquor; only his wife should move him to devote one-sixth of the surface of the food rice. Ironically, his great-grandfather, a high imperial general had just made by the rigid control of any alcohol consumption in the troop a name.

Work

Tao Yuanming wrote a comparatively small oeuvre of only about a hundred poems and some biographies and victims talking.

The central issue is the withdrawal from the world. In particular, his return to his estate he has frequently addressed in poems ". The wandering bird yearns home to the forest, the fish in the pond will be unforgettable sea," it says in Back to Country Life ( Guīyuántiánjū ,归园田居). Become famous is the scene in the Poem of the return ( Guīqùláicí ,归去来辞), where the poet's children receive their father on the Eastern Fence of his estate and that there picks a chrysanthemum, in China the symbol of distinguished seclusion. In many cases, it was later taken up by art and literature.

One of Taos 's most famous works is the original, as a foreword to a collection of poems recording the peach blossom source ( Taohuayuan ji ,桃花源记): A fisherman from Wuling rowing a river up and gets into a peach grove. The watercourse following to its source, he discovered at the end of the grove a crevice. He penetrates the column and thus enters a fertile land where received him happy, cheerful and helpful people with open arms and generous host. Even in the terrible times of the house Qin their ancestors had withdrawn here. Since then she has lived here deposited, but in happiness and peace. Ask the fishermen, after his return to tell anyone of their existence. The reveals the secret, but can later neither the troops of the province governor nor the fair scholar Liu Ziqi find access to the paradisiacal landscape.

Remained in my memory is Tao Yuanming in particular through its twenty -part cycle of poems When wine ( Yīnjiǔ ,饮酒) in which it comes to drunkenness and sobriety, but also for fame and retreat.

Assessment

Tao Yuanming seal can be understood as a protest of a man who faces the world, which, however, only the withdrawal of her remains. His poetry has a simple and straightforward style and in their embodies the type of the misunderstood world of the lonely.

His contemporaries as Tao relatively little, in Zhong Hong's literary history Shipin it is about explicitly referred to as 'second class'. Three hundred years later praised him, of course, the famous Tang poet Li Bai as " incomparable and unobtainable ." The eminent poet Su Dongpo Song admired him so very much that he regarded himself as Tao Yuanming reincarnation. For his poetry Tao is today highly valued in China, on the part of the communists his work supposedly adhering was highlighted " anti-feudal " note.