Judging from the age of life, both Li Bai and Du Fu lived in the period from prosperity to decline in the Tang Dynasty, that is, they experienced the prosperity of Kaiyuan in the early Tang Dynasty and the Anshi Rebellion in the late Tang Dynasty. Du Fu is ten years younger than Li Bai. They are friends who appreciate each other.
However, their personalities are quite different. Li Bai was deeply influenced by the Taoist thought of being born, and at the same time he longed to retire after making contributions. I have an unruly personality. The heyday of his creation happened at the end of the Kaiyuan period, which created his great romantic poetic style. Du Fu entered the heyday of his own creation, which coincided with the Anshi Rebellion, social unrest and people's displacement. Therefore, he deeply realized the sufferings of the lower class, which created his profound realistic poetry style.
As far as their poems are concerned, Li Bai's poems everywhere show the author's whimsy, clank and pride, and sudden heroism, such as "Flying down three thousands of feet, suspecting that the Milky Way has set for nine days" ("Lushan Waterfall"), "Five flowers, thousands of golden flowers, give them to the boy for good wine and sell them together" ("Into the wine"), "Oh, how can I be solemn? Du Fu's works, on the other hand, face social worries with the heart of saving the world and make a deafening sound. For example, "The wine and meat in Zhumen stink, and the bones on the road freeze to death" (500 words from Beijing to Fengxian), "There are thousands of houses in Ande, which protect the faces of the poor people in the world" ("The hut was blown by the autumn wind") and so on.
Combining with genre norms (metrical rules), Du Li and his wife are in the mature stage of modern poetic metrical rules, which is an important period to link the past with the future. Li Bai's writing period is slightly earlier than Du Fu's, so his poems have obvious shadow of Yuefu poems, and the text structure is more free and unrestrained. However, Du Fu's poems are rigorous in metrical form, and the metrical poems he created, whether in genre format or rhetorical devices, are models respected by later generations. In particular, it has had a far-reaching impact on modern poetry creation techniques since the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Therefore, only in terms of influence, their works seem to have the same influence on future generations.
As far as the number of poems handed down from generation to generation is concerned, Li Bai is 10 10, and Du Fu is 1 167. Du Fu's poems handed down from ancient times are slightly more than Li Bai's.