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   Li Po (or Pai) 李白(tzu, T’ai-po太白or T’ai-pai, 701-762) generally shares or competes with Tu Fu * for the honor of being the greatest of the T’ang poets. Li's birthplace is uncertain , perhaps in Central Asia , and a minor branch of Li Po studies centers on the irresolvable question of whether Li was of Turkic origin. Whatever his background , Li grew up in west China (modern Szechwan), and the conventions of the Szechwanese “type” exerted a strong influence on his self-image. The bravura of his poetic voice belonged to a long tradition of poets from the Szechwan region, from Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju * in the Western Han to Ch’en Tzu-ang* in the Early T'ang , and, after Li, to Su Shih* in the Northern Sung.

In the mid-720s Li Po traveled down through the Yangtze Valley , seeking the social connections necessary to gain public recognition. Through his acquaintance with Wu Y ün吳筠 (d. 778), a failed examination candidate turned wizard , Li was summoned to the court of Hsüan-tsung in 742 and given a post in the new Han-lin Academy (an appointment that lay outside the channels of usual bureaucratic   advancement). While serving in court, Li Po traded on his reputation for drunken insouciance and became the Subject of numerous anecdotes. However, the favor that he enjoyed rested on unstable ground , and in 744 he was expelled from court. Thereafter, Li wandered in the east and south-east, proclaiming himself an unappreciated man of genius who had been driven from court by powerful enemies. After the outbreak of the An Lu-shan Rebellion , he became implicated in the secondary revolt of the Prince of Y ün. Whether Li's complicity was voluntary remains uncertain , but when the revolt was smashed, Li was arrested for treason. Eventually he was released and spent his last years wandering in the Yangtze Valley, vainly seeking patrons to restore him to favor with the central government

Of the 1004 poems ascribed to Li in the Ch’üan T’αng shih * (additional attributions in other sources bring the number to just over 1100) , many are probably spurious. Li Po was an easy poet to imitate , and since most of his yüeh-fu* and songs circulated, his name became a convenient one on which to hang poems of unknown authorship. Some studies have attempted to prove the spuriousness of certain attributions, but even so, Li's collected works in their present form may still include a great many false attributions.

Although Li Po’s corpus contains about sixty pieces of prose and eight fu, * it is as a poet that Li is known. The first part of h is poetic collection contains fifty-nine pentasyllabic “old-style” poems collectively entitled Ku-feng古風 (Old Manner). They are written in the thematic and stylistic tradition of the poetry of the Chienan and Wei eras, as it was understood in the T’ang. These works date from various periods of Li's life and include a number of concealed references to topical events. In the Ku-feng Li Po often adopts the voice of a Confucian moralist, a voice entirely proper for the style in which he was writing, but one opposed to his usual pose as inebriate eccentric

After the Ku-feng in Li's collected works, there is a body of yüeh-ju and songs (ko  hsing歌行). These two categories are only loosely differentiated, the former tending to adopt the personae of various yüeh-ju “types,” the later tending to be the poet speaking in his own voice. Li was best known to his contemporaries for these yüeh-ju and songs, and on them his later reputation was founded. “Shu-tao nan 蜀道難 (Hard Roads to Shu), anthologized in Yin Fan’s Ho- yüeh Ying-ling chi 河嶽英靈集 (753), is an excellent example of Li Po's yüeh-ju in the most extravagant manner Using wildly irregular line lengths, Szechwanese exclamations, and long subordinate causes normally excluded from both poetry and literary prose, Li hyperbolically described the difficulties of the mountain journey from Ch’ang-an to Ch’eng-tu. In reference to poems such as this ， Li’s contemporary Yin Fan described the poet's work as “strangeness on top of strangeness.” Li Po’s yüeh-ju and songs used folk motifs, fantastic journeys, mythic beings, and evocations of moments in history and legend to create a poetry of extreme and intense situations. Yet even in Li’s wildest flights of fancy there is a strong undercurrent of irony, and his conscious excesses are such that the poet’s stance is revealed as merely playful

Occasional poems occupy the largest part of Li’s collected works. A few of the more famous are merely occasional applications of the style of Li’s yüeh-ju and songs, but most are formally more conventional Li., Lin wrote such poems, with great facility, and even though he frequently achieved a simple felicity beyond the reach of his more cautious contemporaries, his occasional works are often marred by carelessness. In general, Li Po lacked the carefully controlled craft that came so readily to his contemporaries, who were raised in the upper-class circles of the capital.     

Following Li’s occasional poems in the collected works, there is a small group of private poems containing many of Li’s most famous pieces in even line lengths. Poems such as “Y üeh-hsia tu cho" (Drinking Alone by Moonlight) celebrate the self-image of drunken insouciance in which Li took pride. Readers of classical poetry have always valued a poem’s ability to embody a strong and identifiable personality; in the case of Li Po, personality becomes the subject rather than the involuntary mode of the poem. Even Li’s most speculative fantasy points more strongly to the poet’s imaginative capacity than to the otherworldly objects of his vision.

Li Po was one of the first major figures in what was to become a cult of spontaneity in Chinese poetry. Li proclaimed, and others admired, his capacity to dash off poems in the heat of wine or inspiration. In the case of Li Po, the interest in rapid and spontaneous composition was linked to a belief in innate genius that found its purest expression when untainted by the reflective considerations of craft. Such a concept of individual and innate genius, inimical to plodding poetic craft, is a historical growth within civilization; and the development of such a concept of artistic genius in China owes much to Li Po, who so often made his own genius the true topic of his poetry.

Stylistic simplicity was a natural consequence of spontaneous composition (or of the desire to give the appearance of spontaneity). Not only is the diction and syntax of Li’s poetry generally less bookish, but Li’s poetry is noticably more straightforward than that of his contemporaries. Li Po often referred to persons and events of legend and history, but he did not use textual allusions with the same frequency or precision as his younger contemporary Tu Fu.

Li Po paid Taoist esoterica considerable attention, but this was perhaps less a satisfaction of genuine spiritual interests than appreciation of a source of delightful material for poetic fantasy. It is Li Po’s capacity for fantasy which, more than any other quality, sets him apart from his contemporaries and won him the admiration of later generations. Most T’ang poets (with exceptions such as Li Po’s spiritual descendent Li Ho) were most comfortable treating the world before their eyes; Li Po greets the immortals and watches their fights with greater ease and familiarity than when he bids farewell to a friend.