Ho, Li | J. D. Frodsham (essay date 1970)
J. D. Frodsham (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of Li Ho, translated by J. D. Frodsham, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. xiii-lxiv.
[In the excerpt below, Frodsham reviews the religious, social, and artistic influences on Li Ho's poetry.]
Unusual as Ho's work undoubtedly is, he is nevertheless very much of his time. He does not stand apart from it in the way, say, Blake and Smart stand apart from the eighteenth century. In a sense, his verse simply carries to an extraordinary degree qualities of intensity, floridity and deep-grained pessimism already highly characteristic of T'ang verse. Only in his development of the Ch'u Tz'u tradition can be really be called unique. Take for example the prevailingly pessimistic tone of his verse. From the Han dynasty onwards Chinese poetry is on the whole deeply melancholy in tone. T'ang poetry was no exception to this, and even poets like Tu Fu and Li Po (699-762)...
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