League of Poets

曹植

Cáo Zhí (pronounced as /tsau jhee/)
(192-232 CE)

Cao Zhi was the son of General Cao Cao and the younger brother of Cao Pi, who became King of Wei. He was considered a prodigy by many, including his father, but his brother’s jealousy and fratricidal vendetta cast a long shadow over much of his life. The story goes that at one point, by order of his less gifted, paranoid brother, Cao Zhi was to compose an allegorical poem about the fraternal bond in seven steps. If he failed, he would be executed. The sharp-witted poet survived the death trap with a spontaneous four-liner that has become one of the most recited and quoted of all Chinese poems.

李白

Lǐ Bái

(701-762 CE)

To the Chinese mind, the name Li Bai would conjure up images of a carefree wanderer in eight-century China drinking to his heart’s content while composing poem after poem with his trademark flair and panache, among an ever-widening circle of friends. In fact, Li Bai’s inimitable poetry and romantic, larger-than-life persona earned him the epithet of shī xiān, or Poet-Immortal (xiān being celestial, a mortal being who has outgrown the trammels of physical existence).

孟浩然

Mèng Hàorán

(689-740 CE)

Among Li Bai’s many friends, one person stood out: Meng Haoran. They drank together, socialized together, and wrote poems together. If bromance had been a thing in those days, their friendship would have been its definition. Meng’s life was a story of serendipitous encounters and missed opportunities, largely thanks to liberal imbibing and a recalcitrant rejection of sycophancy. His poetry is mostly about idyllic landscape, country life, travel, and reclusiveness.

杜甫

Dù Fǔ

(712-770 CE)

In the hall of fame of Chinese poetry, Du Fu, the Poet-Sage, is probably the only bard whose pedestal is as high as that of Li Bai, the Poet-Immortal. Initially, Du’s ambition was to become a scholar-official serving his country, instead of arranging “the best words in the best order” in the comfort of his home or in mental seclusion. But destiny had other plans for him. His repeated attempts at a civil service career were scuppered, but a chance meeting with Li Bai, an established maestro by then, gave him a glimpse of the allure of life as a poet. Du’s works, noted for their insightfulness and technical excellence, are a manifestation of the poet’s humanity and an exaltation of beauty, friendship, and moral sensitivity against a bleak backdrop of war, devastation, and indifference.

白居易

Bái Jūyì

(772-846 CE)

Unlike Du Fu, Bai Juyi was successful both as an official (albeit with a four-year exile in between postings) and as a poet. In the former capacity, he was a beacon of integrity rising above a dark mire of systemic corruption; in the latter, he distinguished himself with outspoken critiques of political and social ails. Two long narrative poems, “Everlasting Sorrow” and “The Pipa Player,” sealed Bai’s status as one of the leading poets of the Tang dynasty. “Everlasting Sorrow” tells the love story between the besotted Emperor Xuanzong and his irresistible concubine Lady Yang, whose hold on the emperor was blamed for his neglect of monarchical duties, culminating in a mutiny that left the emperor with no choice but to order Lady Yang’s death and the ensuing guilt that haunted him day and night and in his hallucinatory visions. “The Pipa Player” celebrates the gift and skills of a busking player of the pipa (Chinese lute) and laments the misfortune that had befallen her in a society rife with corruption, poverty, and injustices.

李商隐

Lǐ Shāngyǐn

(813-858 CE)

While Bai Juyi’s scholar-official career was not all smooth sailing, Li Shangyin had a rougher ride as a bureaucrat in the strife-ridden waning years of the Tang dynasty, once a byword for prosperity and good governance. Li opened a window to the sensitive recesses of his mind by crafting intimately sensuous poems, some of which are highly cryptic, dripping in dense allusions. Of the latter the most famous is Jin Se, which, it is generally agreed, defies full decipherment.

王之涣

Wáng Zhīhuàn

(688-742 CE)

Quality over quantity is perhaps an apt description of Wang Zhihuan’s body of work: A mere six poems by him have survived, and two of them are among the GOAT. Legend has it that he and two of his fellow bards were having a drink in a tavern when a group of professional singers came in to entertain a party of court musicians dining at the venue. Watching from the sidelines, the three poets decided to have a competition to see how many of their poems would feature in the performance, and the winner would be the one chalking up the highest tally. Wang was on a losing streak as the entertainers’ repertoire appeared to contain none of his works, until the finale, when the most beautiful songstress of the band performed the highlight of the show: Wang’s “Lyrics for the Tune of Liangzhou.”

王维

Wáng Wéi

(699-761 CE)

Wang Wei (courtesy name Mojie) was a Renaissance man of the Tang dynasty, a poet, painter, musician, scholar-official, and Buddhist practitioner (hence the epithet Poet-Buddha) rolled into one. The fact that his works make up nearly one tenth of the classic “Anthology of Three Hundred Tang Poems,” second only to Du Fu, speaks volumes. Su Shi (1037-1101 CE, see below) said of Wang Wei’s genre-bending work: “When you savor Mojie’s poetry, you taste visual art in the verse; when you regard Mojie’s paintings, you see verse in the visual art.”

杜牧

Dù Mù

(803-852 CE)

Du Mu and Li Shangyin (see above) are referred to together as the “Little Li-Du,” significantly younger than but favorably compared with the “Great Li-Du,” namely, Li Bai and Du Fu. His disillusionment with his civil service career, which had begun on a note of great promise, made its way into his poems, many of which are cast in a somber mood of determinism and powerlessness. But that does not take away from the fact that the genius in him composed many gems of poetry, often by blending contrasting images to create a lift or a liberating transcendence at the end.

李绅

Lǐ Shēn

(772-846 CE)

Compared to other noted poets of the Tang dynasty, Li Shen was first and foremost a politician, and a successful one at that: the highest position he held was that of chancellor. His political inclinations colored his earlier works, which are morally charged and worded in everyday language. Later in life, his poems became more introspective and expressive of his inner thoughts, matched by more ornate poetic parlance. His best known five-character quatrain, “Pitying the Farmers,” quickly gained the status of a motto that resonated with a broad readership in a largely agricultural country. Even today, you would be hard-pressed to find a literate Chinese person who can’t recite this poem.

刘禹锡

Liú Yǔxī

(772-842 CE)

Liu Yuxi was much more than a celebrated poet. His essays and philosophical musings are just as famous as his poems. His worldview was patently influenced by two Buddhist monks with whom he studied in his youth. As a scholar-official, he was twice banished, first for his involvement in a groundbreaking reform of the state machinery and then, a year after the end of his first exile, for writing a satirical poem, a thinly veiled dig at court politics. He was a close friend of Liu Zongyuan (see below), Han Yu (a preeminent poet and essayist), and Bai Juyi (see above). If anything could eclipse the Li Bai-Meng Haoran bromance, it would be the confluence of two poetic minds, i.e. Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi, who exchanged reams of poems addressed to each other with outpourings of mutual admiration or commiseration, or both, till death did them part.

柳宗元

Liǔ Zōngyuán

(773-819 CE)

Much as the story of Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi has touched many hearts over the last millennium, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi go even further back— they grew up together, worked together, and were banished together for their part in the ill-fated reform. It was during his exile that Liu Zongyuan wrote the best of his poems and essays, which recorded, among other things, his impressions of the scenes he saw during his travels.

苏轼

Sū Shì

(1037-1101 CE)

None of these biographical notes could do justice to the amazing life stories of all those luminaries whose brilliance has shone through the millennium-long tunnel of time to dazzle and warm us with their observation, eloquence, wisdom, and humanity couched in masterfully crafted poetic language. And this is even truer in the case of Su Shi, art name Dongpo. Su was many things: a poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter, politician, medicine man, and gourmet par excellence. Suffice it to say he was a towering figure on the literary and political landscape of the Song dynasty, making a name for himself in every discipline he lent his mind to. As a highly principled centrist against utilitarian expediency and quick fixes, Su Shi the politician was unpopular with both of the opposing camps and his career was a story of many setbacks with some purple patches.

He balanced his feeling of frustration with his prolific artistic pursuits and a keen interest in gastronomy. In fact, he purportedly invented a pork recipe (Dongpo pork) that shot him to culinary stardom.

李清照

Lǐ Qīngzhào

(1084-1155 CE)

Su Shi had many students. One of them, a high-ranking scholar-official, had a daughter named Li Qingzhao. Li was an avid reader from a young age and established herself as a respected poet in her teens, a rare feat for a lady in the patriarchal Middle Kingdom. She married a man who shared her interests, and many love poems ensued. Her love life was cut short, however, by her husband’s untimely demise, a personal tragedy compounded by the devastations of war. The water-like feminine sensitivity and elegant tenderness that hallmark most of her early works are tempered with, in later years, steely patriotic outbursts, bordering on battle cries, which reflect her changed fortune and that of her nation. That notwithstanding, Li is generally held to be an exponent of one particular school of lyrical poetry characterized by elaborate and nuanced romantic finesse (wǎnyuē pài).