Lu You
1 min readEarly Career
Lu You(1125-1210),was a Chinese poet of the southern Song dynasty.
Lu You came from a family in which there were some government officials.At that time the southern Song dynasty was frequently invaded by the Jin Dynasty.
When he was one,Kaifeng,the capital of Northern Song dynasty had been captured by the troops of Jin Dynasty.Lu You,who was still an infane,fled with his family.Because of the family influence and social turbulence in childhood,Lu You was committed to save the nation by outing the Jurchens.
0fficial Career
He passed the civil service examination,but was unsuccessful in his official career:he adopted a patriotic stance,advocating the expulsion of the Jurchen from northern China,but this position was out of tune with the times.He retired to Shaoxing in frustration.
Style
Lu You wrote over ten thousand poems,in both the shi and ci forms,plus a number of prose works.In his poetry he continues to articulate the beliefs which cost him his official career,calling for reconquest of the north.Watson identifies these works as part of the legacy of Du Fu.Watson compares a second body of work,poems on country life and growing old,to those of Bai Juyi and Tao Qian.Lu You had written a lot of poem in his whole life,more than 10000,still having 9300 after erasing some of them by Lu You himself.