Abstract: In the autumn of 752 Du Fu (712--770) began to work out new ways to address political ideas in poetry, creating a unique political-philosophical poetics. There are three keys to understanding this poetics. First, many have identified natural, descriptive realism---as distinct from literary tradition and convention---as a major feature Du Fu's political and social criticism. Less well studied are the figurative aspects of the many seemingly realistic passages of Du's poetry that, upon closer reading, often have as much to do with literary tradition as with descriptive realism. Call this figurative realism---a surface realism that points to antecedent conventions and texts, a poetic method by which Du Fu builds into his descriptive texture multiple layers of meaning with multiple political and poetic resonances. Second, figurative realism is often expressed in connection with Du Fu's engagement with the writers, traditions and conventions of Chinese literary history, in the context of the ideal, much in vogue in the Tang (618--907), of returning to antiquity (fugu). This study argues that Du Fu's achievement consists not in dispensing with tradition, but rather in mastering it to the point where he could manipulate it in thoroughly innovative ways, both in rewriting past models in his own mold, and also in manipulating, in some poems, two poetic sub-genres in one composition. The latter practice has been called 'breaks' or 'juxtaposition.' It is explained here as an innovation in literary form. Third, figurative realism and a deep engagement with the past are vehicles for conveying a particular structure of imagery in all of the poems considered in this study---a structure that places images of kings, ministers and courts together with images of cataclysmic floods, thereby suggesting a natural relationship between moral action in the human realm and the order of nature itself. With these practices, Du Fu gives us visions of the moral and political dissolution of Tang civilization, in which the poet himself assumes the persona of a Mencian Hero of Sympathy, whose heart of compassion encompasses the entire political realm.