Li Bai
701 – 762 · China
Known for: Tang dynasty poet, called the Immortal of Poetry, of whom a thousand poems survive
“The Tang called him the immortal banished among men.”
Biography
Li Bai was born around the year 701, either in the Silk Road town of Suyab in Central Asia, where his family traded on the frontier, or already in Sichuan. The sources have disagreed about it for twelve centuries. What is certain is that he grew up in Sichuan, in the town of Qinglian, after his father moved the household there when the boy was about four years old. He read early and widely, the Confucian classics beside astrological and metaphysical writings, and he acquired young the two habits that shaped his legend: wandering and wine. His courtesy name was Taibai, Great White, the Tang name for the planet Venus, which his mother was said to have dreamt of before his birth.
Li Bai's poems are the record of a life spent in motion: mountains and rivers, farewells to friends at river crossings, nights of drinking, dreams shot through with the imagery of Daoist flight. About a thousand poems survive under his name, among them The Hard Road to Shu, Bring in the Wine and Quiet Night Thought, which Chinese schoolchildren still learn by heart. He was recognised in his own lifetime. Yin Fan gathered his work into the anthology Heyue yingling ji in 753, and his poetry was named one of the Three Wonders of the age, beside the swordplay of Pei Min and the calligraphy of Zhang Xu. For a short period in the early 740s he served at the court of Emperor Xuanzong in Changan, in the Hanlin Academy, before leaving that world behind him. His friendship with the younger Du Fu, who wrote about him with open admiration, joined the two names for good.
The rebellion of the general An Lushan tore the empire apart from 755 onward and carried Li Bai with it. He entered the service of Prince Yong, was arrested when the prince was destroyed as a rebel, and was sentenced to exile in the far south, a sentence lifted while he was still on the road. He died in 762 at Dangtu, in the house of his relative Li Yangbing, who preserved his papers. Legend preferred a better ending and told that he drowned while reaching from a boat for the reflection of the moon. Thirty four of his poems entered the Three Hundred Tang Poems, the anthology through which most readers still meet Tang verse, and eleven of the nineteen pieces in Ezra Pound's Cathay of 1915 were his, which is how he first reached English. He is read today as the Immortal of Poetry, the freest voice of the Tang.