"As a member of society, in the daytime going to work, earning his living, paying his debts, respecting the old, bringing up the young, every man must make use of a great deal of Confucian illumination of the Tao; but he must also liberate himself at times, as an individual, from all this and escape from what would be called his real problems together with their potentially illuminated solutions; letting the light of the Tao itself be reflected in his dreams at night; which are no less part of his life and of his humanity. 

Li Po is the Taoist in this pair of poets, and his constantly recurring symbol is the reflected light of the Moon at night; whilst Tu Fu is the Confucian who from early childhood made the Phoenix his symbol, the Fire Bird symbolising the Yang.

[..]

The name of his original home would therefore have meant very little to his contemporaries, who must be excused also for not knowing his place of birth because he spent most of his life travelling and had the romantic habit of speaking of many places he particularly liked as if they were his own home.

[...]

This difference is very important to the reader of Chinese poetry (though the apparatus of our language obscures it in translation) for Chinese poetry tends to be in the most concise and so most generalised form of the Chinese language; which is not the same as 'vague', but is such as to achieve vividness by giving greatest freedom to the reader's own imagination - in a scene that the poet himself has set. Something similar can also be observed in Chinese painting, which does not so much invite the viewer to take the artist's seat as to take his own walk in the landscape. (The translator of Chinese poetry has often to determine the walk more precisely than the original; but he cannot translate it into anything less than his own language requires.)"

Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems Selected and Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Arthur Cooper