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Biography of T'ao Ch'ien
Name: T'ao Ch'ien
Birth Date: 365
Death Date: 427
Place of Birth: Ch'ai-sang, Kiangsi Province, China
Nationality: Chinese
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet
T'ao Ch'ien
T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) was one of China's foremost poets in the five-word shih style, and his influence on subsequent poets was very great.Also known as T'ao Yüan-ming, T'ao Ch'ien lived during the Eastern Chin and Liu Sung dynasties. He was born in Ch'ai-sang in present-day Kiangsi Province, the great-grandson of T'ao K'an, a famed Chin general. Both his grandfather and father had served as perfects, but by T'ao Ch'ien's time the family must have become poorer, and despite his preference for a life of seclusion he held at least four different posts during some dozen years (393-405) in order to support his family.T'ao did not serve very long, however, in his last post as magistrate of P'eng-tse (405). According to a famous anecdote recorded in his official biographies, he voluntarily resigned when summoned to appear before a superior so that he did not have to bow in obeisance for …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…fascinate the Chinese since. Further Reading The poems of T'ao Ch'ien were translated by William Acker as T'ao the Hermit: Sixty Poems by T'ao Ch'ien (1952) and by Lily Pao-hu Chang and Marjorie Sinclair as Poems (1953). A number of anthologies of Chinese poetry in translation contain selections from T'ao Ch'ien, including Arthur Waley, Chinese Poems (1946); Robert Payne, The White Pony: An Anthology of Chinese Poetry (1947); and J. D. Frodsham and Ch'eng Hsi, An Anthology of Chinese Verse: Han, Wei, Chin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (1967). Every history of Chinese literature for Western readers discusses T'ao Ch'ien at some length, though there is no full-length study in English. James R. Hightower has done notable work on the poet in his articles "The Fu of T'ao Ch'ien" in John L. Bishop, ed., Studies in Chinese Literature (1965), and "T'ao Ch'ien's 'Drinking Wine' Poems" in Chow Tse-tsung, ed., Wen-lin: Studies in the Chinese Humanities (1968).
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