Li Bai -- the Exiled Immortal
Li Bai has perhaps the purest lyric voice of any poet
who ever
dipped quill or feather or brush into ink well. He wrote in the manner
of a great nature poet. And he wrote with the easy self-confidence of a
great spiritual being, enough so that he earned nicknames from his
contemporaries,
such as the Exiled Immortal and the Transcendent from Heaven. As I hope
you can tell in some of the
translations of his poems below, he could easily wrap the natural and
spiritual together in a few brief stanzas better than any other man of
his or any other time.
Let me start by giving you a portion of Li Bai's biography taken from the New History of the Tang Dynasty, which was written in the 11th Century. I am borrowing here from the translation of this text by the great sinologist Arthur Waley, which is excerpted from his monograph, The Poet Li Bai. Li Bai's biography
Selection of poems by Li Bai
Li Bai wrote many poems, more than 1,000 of which have been passed down to us today. Here's a small selection, which I hope illustrates how his voice still calls out lout and clear through a range of moods and lyrics, whether composed at night in a mountain temple, or stumbling drunkely upstream in search of the moon.