Poetry:
“Ballad of Chang-an” (as “The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter,” in Cathay, 1915; Ezra Pound, translator)
The Poetry and Career of Li Po, 1950 (Arthur Waley, editor)
Li Po and Tu Fu, 1973 (Arthur Cooper, editor)
During the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in China, the ability to compose poetry became a part of the official examination system, through which candidates obtained government appointments and entered the upper echelons of society. Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand poems were composed by twenty-three hundred poets. The age became a golden one for poetry, particularly during the period extending from 713 to 765, which scholars have designated the High Tang, when the poetic genius of the time reached its pinnacle. Li Bo (lee boh), also known as Li Po, along with Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Wang Wei, is one of the three major poets of this period. He is one of China’s, and the world’s, best-loved poets.
Li Bo
Because Li Bo was born in Turkestan and was known to be able to compose poetry in “another language,” people have often conjectured that he might have been Turkish in origin. It seems, however, that he was the descendant of a Chinese nobleman named Li Gao (related distantly to the founder of the Tang Dynasty, Li Yuan), who got into trouble in China and fled with his family to Turkestan. Li Ge, Li Bo’s father, moved the family back to the Chinese city of Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, when Li Bo was four years old.
As a young man, Li Bo’s inclinations lay in the direction not only of poetry but also of what might be called “natural science” and what his contemporaries considered Daoist magic; for example, he is said to have learned the art of taming wild birds. He was also an accomplished swordsman, a kind of Chinese knight-errant who took to heart the injustice of the world and righted the wrongs inflicted upon others. By the age of twenty, he had fought and won several duels.
By the time he was twenty-four, Li Bo had left home to make a name for himself and to initiate what would become a lifetime of wandering. He sailed east down the Yangtze River as far as Nanjing and Yangzhou, then returned upstream to Yumen in Hebei Province, where he married the granddaughter of a retired prime minister. He next appeared in Shanxi, where his testimony helped save a soldier named Guo Ziyi from court-martial.
Because of the extent to which poetry and government service were linked in traditional Chinese civilization, almost every Chinese poet was an official of some sort, and therefore sat for the official examinations. Li Bo is remarkable for always having refused to do so, thus bypassing the usual avenue to renown. Instead, he attracted the attention of Emperor Xuan Zong through the recommendation of the Daoist wizard Wu Yun, who had befriended Li Bo south of the Yangtze. Summoned to court in the capital of Changan, Li Bo met another famous Daoist, He Zhizhang, who exclaimed, “Why, you do not belong to this world. You are an immortal fallen from Heaven!” From then on, Li Bo was referred to as the Fallen Immortal. Impressed with his intellectual and poetic abilities, the emperor in 742 appointed him directly to the Hanlin Academy, an academy for poets and entertainers, appointment to which bypassed the usual bureaucratic channels. It was at this time that Li Bo, a founding member of the literary group that came to be known as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, became famous for his love of wine and for writing his poetry in a state of intoxicated transport.
Because of his brash outspokenness, Li Bo kept this post only three years before falling from favor and being politely but firmly banished from Changan. He moved to Shandong but recommenced his characteristic wanderings throughout most of the provinces of China. Then the military rebellion of An Lushan took place in 755 and the emperor was forced to flee to Sichuan. After the crown prince assumed control of the government the following year, he was challenged by another son of the emperor, Prince Yong, with whom Li Bo had found service. When the troops of Prince Yong were defeated in 757, Li Bo was imprisoned and sentenced to death.
However, Guo Ziyi–the humble soldier whose career Li Bo had saved with his testimony years before–was now minister of war and commander in chief of the imperial forces: He interceded with the emperor on Li Bo’s behalf, offering to give up his position in exchange for the poet’s life. The death sentence was changed to banishment to Yelang, and that too was remitted while Li Bo was on the journey there.
Upon a new emperor’s accession to the throne in 762, Li Bo was appointed, for the first time, to an official government position. He died, however, in Sichuan, before the news of the appointment could reach him. Popular legend has always insisted that Li Bo drowned after leaning too far over the edge of a boat one night in a drunken effort to embrace the image of the moon upon the waters.
Li Bo represents everything that might be called romantic in Chinese, and indeed world, literary traditions. A lover of nature and of the irrational and magical, he was an individualist who treasured freedom and spontaneity over prudence and convention. His life was a celebration of the joys of the open road and of the illumination and insight born of transport and intoxication–what William Blake meant when he wrote that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Understandably, Li Bo’s work influenced that of the poets of the American Beat generation.