The work of the Tang dynasty Chinese poet Du Fu was introduced to the English-speaking literary world rather late. Two epoch-making collections of classical Chinese poetry in English translation-Ezra Pound\u27s Cathay (1915) and Arthur Waley\u27s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) gave pride of place to poems by Li Bai but included none by Du Fu. Thirteen poems by Du Fu included in Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough\u27s Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems From the Chinese (1921) are said to be the earliest translated into English. Lowell was an Imagist poet strongly influenced by Pound, and her English translations of Chinese poetry might be seen as sequels to Pound\u27s Cathay. Lowell herself did not read Chinese; she took glosses on the original Chinese poems provided by Ayscough and reworked them into English poetry. Thus it was Ayscough who was responsible for selecting the Du Fu poems-which were samples of his work frequently found in Chinese anthologies of Tang poetry, and still regarded as masterpieces of his poetry. Fir-Flower Tablets also contains numerous poems by Li Bai; in fact, a greater number than those by Du Fu. This is indicative of the state of the reception of Du Fu\u27s poetry in the English-speaking world in the first half of the twentieth century
