Du Fu's poems are not the spirit of flourishing the Tang Dynasty, let alone the spirit of opening a new century and improving the world.
600 Tang poems embody the breath of the Tang Dynasty to the fullest. You are not mistaken, not 300, but 600. This is an anthology of Jin Shengtan's comments, all of which are seven-character decrees, which measure the poetic style of the Tang Dynasty on the same scale. In this book, Lao Du was not selected.
Two reasons. First, Lao Du is too tall to stand side by side with other poets. Second, Lao Du's poems cannot be simply regarded as Tang poems.
Du Fu's contemporary poets, you can call the poems written by them the poems of Kaiyuan Tianbao period. But Du Fu's poems can only be described as Tang poems, not as Tang poems. Because he is an alien in Tang poetry. In the Tang dynasty, his smell was very different from others.
Since the Tang Dynasty, there have been three levels of national poetry: Tang poetry, Song poetry and Qing poetry.
Let's just say that in the Tang poetry camp, only one person is Du Fu, and that is Du Fu himself. In the Song poetry camp, nearly half of the country is Du Fu, and the other half is influenced by Du Fu, which exceeds the sum of all other poets including Li Bai during the Tianbao period of Kaiyuan. In the camp of Qing poetry, seven or eight out of ten people are Du Fu.
Du Fu's poems are not poetic. He has the ability to pour the experience of life and death into his poems without discount. It seems that he doesn't talk about subtlety and roughness, but there is no loss in transmitting the emotions of the scene to his pen. On the signal-to-noise ratio, Lao Du finished blasting everyone in the Tang Dynasty.
But if you really think Lao Du is rough and sloppy, you are all wet. As a genius, Lao Du made great efforts behind his back and said, "Why learn Yin?" And "Poetry tapers off at dusk." After Du Fu's middle age, after wandering from place to place, his poems reached a superb level. The experience of "singing only with ghosts and gods" is rarely seen in other collections of Tang poems, but it is everywhere in Du Fu's poems.