Born into an impoverished aristocratic family, Tao Qian took a minor official post while in his 20s in order to support his aged parents. After about 10 years at that post and a brief term as county magistrate, he resigned from official life, repelled by its excessive formality and widespread corruption. With his wife and children he retired to a farming village south of the Yangtze River. Despite the hardships of a farmer's life and frequent food shortages, Tao was contented, writing poetry, cultivating the chrysanthemums that became inseparably associated with his poetry, and drinking wine, also a common subject of his verse.

Because the taste of Tao's contemporaries was for an elaborate and artificial style, his simple and straightforward poetry was not fully appreciated until the Tang dynasty (618–907). A master of the five-word line, Tao has been described as the first great poet of tianyuan (“fields and gardens”), landscape poetry inspired by pastoral scenes (as opposed to the then-fashionable shanshui 【“mountains and rivers”】 poetry). Essentially a Daoist in his philosophical outlook on life and death, he also freely adopted the elements of Confucianism and Buddhism that most appealed to him.