Bai Juyi

Bai Juyi a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, one of the most prolific and widely read poets of the Chinese tradition and a lifelong advocate of poetry as an instrument of social criticism and reform. His plain, accessible style and his concern for the suffering of the common people made him beloved by ordinary readers both in China and abroad.

Early Life and Official Career

Bai Juyi was born in 772 in Xinzheng, in what is now Henan province, into a family of minor officials. The disorder of the years after the An Lushan rebellion and the poverty of his family left a deep impression on him, and throughout his life he sympathised with the hardships of the poor. He was a diligent student and passed the imperial examination in 800.

He then entered the public service and rose through a series of appointments in the capital and the provinces. He held posts as a censor, where he was known for his outspoken criticism of corruption and injustice, and as a drafter of imperial edicts. His willingness to criticise powerful men earned him enemies at court and led more than once to his demotion and exile.

In 815 he was banished to a minor post in Jiangzhou, on the Yangtze, a demotion that was a turning point in his life and his poetry. The experience of exile and the reading of the works of his predecessors matured his art and deepened his compassion, and some of his most famous poems were written in these years.

The New Yuefu and Social Poetry

Bai Juyi believed that poetry should have a moral purpose. Together with his friend Yuan Zhen he led the movement known as the New Yuefu, which revived the ancient tradition of the music-bureau ballad as a vehicle for social and political comment. In these poems the poet observes the suffering of peasants, soldiers, weavers and women and calls the failings of the government to account.

His poems on the hardships of the people, such as the Song of the Charcoal Seller and the poems on the palace women, are direct, vivid and compassionate. He wrote of taxes that crush the poor, of soldiers sent to die on distant frontiers, of women neglected and abandoned, and of officials who enrich themselves at public expense. The style is simple and the message clear.

He divided his own work into categories, of which the satirical poems and the poems of leisure were the most important to him. He prized above all the poems that he believed could move the heart of a ruler and correct the abuses of the age, and he judged his own success by their moral usefulness rather than by their ornament.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Narrative Verse

Bai Juyi's most celebrated poem in the Chinese tradition is the Song of Everlasting Sorrow, a long narrative poem on the love of Emperor Xuanzong for his consort Yang Guifei and on the catastrophe of the An Lushan rebellion. It blends history, romance and tragedy, and it ends with the emperor's grief and his vain search for the spirit of his beloved in the world beyond.

The poem became one of the most beloved in Chinese literature and was retold in drama and fiction for centuries. Its mixture of courtly beauty and national disaster, of private passion and public ruin, made it a model of narrative verse. Its fame spread beyond China, and it was known and admired in Japan and Korea.

Bai Juyi wrote many other narrative and descriptive poems, including the Song of the Pipa, in which a chance encounter with a musician in exile becomes a meditation on disappointment and the passing of youth. These poems show his gift for storytelling, for vivid scene-painting and for the sympathetic portrayal of ordinary lives.

Later Years and the Poems of Leisure

In his later years Bai Juyi held high office, serving as governor of Hangzhou and of Suzhou, where he was remembered for public works including the building of dykes and the improvement of irrigation. He retired to Luoyang, where he lived in a garden estate on Mount Xiang and devoted himself to poetry, music, Buddhism and the company of friends.

The poems of this period are quieter and more personal. He wrote of old age, illness, friendship and the pleasures of retirement, and of the beauty of his garden and the surrounding hills. His tone is relaxed and reflective, and his language remains plain and direct, so that his late verse has the intimacy of a conversation with a friend.

He was a devout Buddhist and a patron of monasteries, and his later poems express a religious resignation and a hope of tranquillity. He outlived most of his friends, including Yuan Zhen, whom he mourned in some of his most touching verses. He died in 846 at the age of seventy-four, honoured and widely admired.

Influence and Legacy

Bai Juyi was among the most famous poets of his own lifetime, and his fame extended far beyond China. His works were eagerly sought in Japan, where they influenced the development of Japanese poetry and were included in the great imperial anthologies, and they were known in Korea and among the neighbouring peoples of Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

His plain and accessible style influenced generations of later poets who valued clarity and moral purpose over ornamental difficulty. The tradition of social poetry that he helped to establish remained a resource for writers in later ages who wished to use verse to comment on the condition of the people and the conduct of government.

He wrote nearly three thousand poems, an enormous body of work that documents the whole span of a long life and a turbulent age. His combination of craftsmanship, compassion and simplicity has kept him among the most read of all Chinese poets, and his verses are still recited by schoolchildren and enjoyed by readers who seldom open a book of poetry.

See also

• Yuan Zhen
• Tang poetry
• Song of Everlasting Sorrow
• New Yuefu movement