Li Po(700-760) and Tu Fu(712-770) have been paired together as the twin culminations of Tang Poetry. Li Po was the social outsider, whose dazzling displays of verbal magic and spontaneous composition delighted the audiences of Chang-an. Tu Fu, on the other hand, was the son of a wealthy and cultured family: his grandfather had been one of the leading poets of his day. In the mid-720s Li Po traveled down through the Yangtze Valley, seeking connections necessary to gain public recognition. Li wandered in the east and south east, proclaiming himself an unappreciated man of genius who had been driven from court by powerful enemies. Li Po was one of the first major figures in what was to become a cult of spontaneity in Chinese poetry. In the case Li Po, the interest in rapid and spontaneous composition was linked to a belief in innate genius that found its purest expression when untainted by the reflective considerations craft. Such a concept of individual and innate genius, inimical to plodding poetic craft, is a historical growth within civilization; and the development of such a concept of artistic genius in China owes much to Li Po, who so often made his own genius the true topic of his poetry. Stylistic simplicity was a natural consequence of spontaneous composition. Not only is the diction and syntax of Li``s poetry generally less bookish, but Li``s poetry is noticably more straightford than that of his contemporaries. Tu fu made a too ambiguous exemplar for any particular school of art or thought to champion immediately. Although he claimed early renown as a prodigy of letters and mingled with the writers of his time, he led no coterie-indeed his ambitions, however delusive they may have been, lay in the realm of real and not literary politics. Artistically more significant are his carefully unified Lu-shi(律詩) series such as Qiu xing(秋興)(Autumn Sentiments). Especially noteworthy is Tu Fu``s syntax, which becomes at once more tortuous and more ambiguous; realism becomes surrealism as line after line invites construal in a variety of complementary ways. This ambiguity in the "Autumn Sentiments" reinforces Tu Fu``s ability to fuse the sorrow of his own personal situation with passionate concern for the larger agony of his country. The series is without doubt Tu Fu``s crowning masterpiece and among the greatest poems in the Chinese language.