Li Bai

Li Bai a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, celebrated as one of the two greatest poets of the golden age of Chinese verse and honoured by tradition as the Poet Immortal. His exuberant, imaginative and free-spirited poems on wine, friendship, nature and the adventures of a wandering life have made him a permanent presence in Chinese literature.

Life and Wanderings

Li Bai was born in 701, probably in the far west of China or in Central Asia, in a family that may have had connections with the Silk Road trade. He grew up in Sichuan, and already as a young man he was known for his restless temperament, his love of the sword and his ambition to serve the empire as an adviser and statesman. He set out on a life of travel at an early age.

He adopted the courtesy name Taibai, after the great white star, and took the sobriquet Qinglian Jushi, the dweller of the blue lotus. For much of his life he wandered through the great cities and scenic landscapes of China, visiting the mountains of the south and the plains of the north, seeking patrons, writing poems and forming friendships with officials, monks and fellow poets.

In 742 he was summoned to the court at Chang'an, where the emperor Xuanzong, impressed by his fame, appointed him to a position in the Hanlin Academy. For a brief time he enjoyed the favour of the court and the company of the leading poets and courtiers. But he was unsuited to the discipline of office and to the intrigue of the palace, and he was dismissed and sent away in 744.

Poetry and Style

Li Bai wrote in many forms, but he excelled above all in the old-style verses that allowed free play of imagination and rhythm. His poems are marked by vivid imagery, bold hyperbole, a love of the vast and the sublime, and a spontaneous musicality. He wrote of the moon, of wine, of mountains and rivers, of parting and of the longing for freedom, with an energy that seems effortless.

Among his most famous works are the Quiet Night Thoughts, a short meditation on homesickness, and the poems on drinking, such as Bringing in the Wine, with its sweeping invitation to seize the moment. He wrote of the perils of the road, of his admiration for the heroes of antiquity, and of his dreams of transcendence, and he had a special fondness for the strange and the marvellous.

His poetry is often contrasted with that of his friend Du Fu, the other great poet of the age. Where Du Fu is grave, historical and compassionate, Li Bai is soaring, personal and intoxicated with possibility. The two are remembered together as complementary, the sage and the immortal, and Chinese criticism long debated their relative merits.

Friendship with Du Fu and Court Connections

In 744, after leaving the court, Li Bai met Du Fu, then an aspiring poet some years his junior. The two travelled together for a time, and their brief friendship left a deep mark on Du Fu, who wrote many poems in memory of Li Bai in later years. Their association became one of the most cherished in Chinese literary history.

Li Bai also knew other leading literary figures of the age, including the poet and statesman He Zhizhang and the poet Wang Wei, and he was connected with the circles that gathered around the court. His fame as a poet spread widely during his lifetime, and he was sought out by admirers and patrons wherever he travelled.

His relationship with the political world was always uneasy. He aspired to the role of a great strategist and adviser, and he had a romantic notion of service to a worthy ruler, but he lacked the patience and the tact that office required. His poems express both his longing for recognition and his impatience with the compromises of the world.

The An Lushan Rebellion and Last Years

The great crisis of his life came with the An Lushan rebellion, which broke out in 755 and devastated the empire. Li Bai was in the south when the fighting began, and in the confused politics of the time he became associated with the prince Li Lin, one of the emperor's sons, who attempted to establish an independent authority in the Yangtze region.

When the prince's movement was crushed, Li Bai was arrested and condemned to death. He was saved by the intervention of friends and of the general Guo Ziyi, who had once been helped by Li Bai, and the sentence was commuted to exile in the far southwest. He set out for Yelang but was pardoned on the way, and he returned to spend his last years in the south and east.

He died in 762, according to tradition while reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water, a legend that captures both the beauty and the recklessness of his character. His death is more soberly recorded as an illness at the house of a relative, but the imagined story has endured and become part of his myth.

Influence and Legacy

Li Bai is one of the most widely read and loved poets in the Chinese language, and his verses are learned by children and recited by adults across East Asia. He is the archetype of the poet as free spirit, and his name is attached to the ideal of a life lived for beauty, friendship and the open road. His image appears in painting, on porcelain and in popular culture.

His influence on later poets was profound. Writers of the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties looked back to him as a model of imaginative freedom, and translators in the modern world have made him one of the best-known Chinese poets abroad. His poems have been rendered into many languages, and he is often the first Chinese poet encountered by foreign readers.

Together with Du Fu he defines the summit of Tang poetry, and the two are studied and honoured as the twin geniuses of an age whose verse is regarded as the finest in the Chinese tradition. His immortality in literature was, in a sense, exactly what his poems had sought, and the title of Poet Immortal has clung to him for more than a thousand years.

See also

• Du Fu
• Tang poetry
• An Lushan Rebellion
• Emperor Xuanzong of Tang