Probably more has been written about Tao Qian, in whatever language, than about any other Chinese poet. Studies by Japanese scholars alone, to whom Tao Qian most strongly appealed, run into many hundreds of titles. Tao Qian is primarily associated with the foundations of the tianyuan, or “pastoral” (literally, “cultivated fields and orchards”) school of poetry (as opposed to the rugged shanshui “mountains and waters” landscapes of his contemporary, the celebrated nobleman Xie Lingyun, 385-433). The unadorned directness of his poetic diction and the innocent, touching sentiment of his anchorite forbearance have perennially appealed to the oversophisticated Chinese bureaucrat-litterateur. Writing in the prevailing pentameter line of his day, Tao Qian was the first to exploit the shi lyric form extensively for such topics as wine (which he tirelessly celebrated) and the idiosyncrasies of his own children. These eventually became favorite themes in Tang and later poetry. As James Robert Hightower has observed in The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien, “even the shortest and most selective list of famous Chinese poets would have to find a place for Tao Qian,” and his poetry above that of all others appears the most frequently in anthologies of Chinese verse.