In art, his poems are novel in imagination, unique in conception, strong in emotion, magnificent in artistic conception, fresh and bright in language, magnificent in momentum and unrestrained in style, forming a bold and unrestrained artistic style, reaching the peak of positive romantic poetry in ancient China.
Du Fu lived in the historical period from prosperity to decline in the Tang Dynasty.
The core of Du Fu's thought is the Confucian thought of benevolent government. He has a great ambition of "making the monarch Yao and Shun superior first, and then making the customs pure". He loves life, people and the great rivers and mountains of the motherland. He hated evil, criticized and exposed the corruption of the imperial court and the dark phenomenon in social life. He sympathized with the people and even fantasized that he was willing to make self-sacrifice to save their suffering.
His poetry creation always runs through the main line of worrying about the country and the people, with the most ordinary people as the protagonist, which shows Du Fu's greatness. His poems are rich in social content, rich in the color of the times and distinctive in political inclination, which truly and profoundly reflect the political current affairs and broad social life prospect of a historical era before and after the An Shi Rebellion, and are called the "history of poetry" of a generation. The style of Du Fu's poems is basically "gloomy and frustrated", and the language and text structure are full of changes, emphasizing the refinement of words and sentences. At the same time, his poems have many styles. Besides the five ancient poems, the seven ancient poems, the five laws and the seven laws, he also wrote many lines. There are also various artistic techniques, which are the epitome of the ideological art of Tang poetry. Du Fu also inherited the spirit of Yuefu in Han and Wei Dynasties, got rid of the shackles of the ancient Yuefu themes and created many new Yuefu themes, such as the famous Three Officials and Three Farewells. After his death, he was highly praised by Huang Fan, Han Yu, Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi. Du Fu's poems had a far-reaching influence on Bai Yuan's literary thought of "New Yuefu Movement" and Li Shangyin's near-body allegorical current affairs poems.