He seems half-man, half-myth. The personality that informs the poems and that is haloed by a long tradition of deep affection may once have been less than legendary, but it can never have been ordinary. The Chinese have valued Li Po for his gaiety, freedom, sympathy and energy for so long that he has become a sort of archetype of the bohemian artist and puckish wanderer. The story that he drowned when he drunkenly tried to embrace the moon in the river is doubtless apocryphal, but it is also delightfully apt to anyone who knows his work; and the scholar who protested that the poem addressed to Tu Fu could not be by Li Po because the latter would never address the former with such levity and disrespect was laboring under a misplaced notion of decorum. The stories that have come down to us, whether legend or fact, have an effective way of integrating the life of the man and the spirit of the work, perhaps the nicest kind of gift that posterity can bestow on a poet.

A number of these poems are about drinking and being drunk, and while that theme is not exclusive to Li Po, it is one he is obviously particularly comfortable with. That partly tells us how much Li Po enjoyed his wine, but since lots of poets like to drink without ever feeling moved to write about it, we also need to see how it serves him as a poetic metaphor. Life at its best, as Li Po envisions it, is a kind of intoxication, an elevation; poetry, like good wine, should help us get perspective on ourselves and put the cares of the world aside. Even nature, as Li Po likes to present it, has a kind of intoxicated quality, especially in spring. The poet's presentation of himself as drunkenly enjoying some natural setting is thus a cleverly unpretentious way of presenting transcendent states of mind and being. This idea isn’t exclusive to Li Po, but he handles the metaphor of the bibulous poet in a tipsy world as well as anyone before or since.

We can get some notion of Li Po's distinctive voice and manner if we compare his “climbing” poem, “High in the Mountains, I Fail to Find the Wise Man,” with a comparable Wang Wei poem, “Passing the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance.” Both poets present themselves as wandering around half-lost in the mountains, looking for someone or something sacred. Wang Wei's progression of images is sure and exciting, moving to the quiet closure with the speaker meditating next to a still pond or lake as the evening comes on. Whether he has also found the temple scarcely seems to matter, since he has found, in effect, the peace of mind he was presumably searching for. Li Po's poem begins more abruptly, moves forward more unpredictably, and ends more astonishingly. Its movements from image to image seem like slightly larger leaps, and each image or sensation—the sight of the deer, the sudden sky overhead, the breathtakingly beautiful sight of the waterfall—is charged with delight and magic. The ending (if my interpretation of it is correct) is a more striking version of Wang Wei's idea: after this set of experiences, any upset or “grief” about failing in his original purpose is almost comically irrelevant. Each poet has his own strengths: Wang Wei's sure sense of detail and ability to pull a poem together around its closing image are especially impressive, along with his subtle handling of tone. In Li Po's case, there is a greater willingness to be centrifugal, to let the poem scatter in several directions, a risky tendency that fits nicely with the metaphoric “intoxication” I have spoken of, and that is surely one source of the legend of Li Po as carefree wanderer and social misfit.

Another difference from Wang Wei can be found in Li Po's willingness to cast poems in the voices of people other than himself. The most famous example is the great poem Ezra Pound translated under the title “The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter.” My own examples are the little poem titled “She Thinks of Him” and the poem spoken by soldiers, “‘We Fought South of the Ramparts.’” The first example serves to demonstrate how convincingly Li Po could speak through the sensibility and experience of a woman; the second shows the social and political insights he was capable of. Both are part of a larger tendency to sympathize with the world and people he encountered, an ability to enter fully into the experiences of others. This ability also gave Li Po his keen appreciation of the value of friendship. Like Wang Wei, he has times of solitude in which he appreciates total isolation, and, again like Wang Wei, he likes to balance such moments with company and conviviality. But the appreciation of the company of others that is somewhat ceremonious and guarded in Wang Wei becomes a heartfelt enthusiasm for friends and a genuine distress at parting from them in Li Po. Moments of separation fascinate him because of the challenge they present to his pursuit of elation, and his solutions, or resolutions, are poignant and various. Again, we are talking about one poet's handling of what was already a tradition—poems of friendship and leave-taking were a standard type by Li Po's time—but the distinctiveness and authenticity of that handling are among the hallmarks of Li Po's work.

Most of the experts now date Li Po's birth as 701, which would make him the same age as Wang Wei, and some eleven years older than Tu Fu. He seems to have been born outside of China, perhaps in present-day Afghanistan, but in any case he grew up in the mountainous south-western province of Szechwan. As a boy he showed what would become a lifelong interest in meditation and spiritual discipline by going off to study with a hermit known as the Master of the Eastern Cliff. He was also, as a young man, something of a swordsman. His gifts eventually took him to the capital and the service of the Emperor, but he was too unruly for court life, and soon resumed his routine of travel, study, drinking bouts, and writing. During the period of civil war he fell in with a rebellious prince of the royal family and was imprisoned for a time. He died in relative poverty, famous in his own lifetime as an unusually gifted poet in a nation of poets.

The man who emerges from the poems and from the scraps of contemporary accounts was certainly not without flaws of character. He was boastful, given to exaggeration and downright lying, and irresponsible as a father, husband, and citizen. His status as a social misfit equipped him for the life of a recluse or monk, but unfortunately he had expensive tastes and loved good company, expensive wine, and dancing girls. He never stood for the Civil Service exams, an extraordinary thing when we recall that success in them depended so much upon poetic ability. As Arthur Waley puts it:

The poems, then, are those of a man who in the eyes of a society largely dominated by bureaucratic values had completely failed in his career or rather had failed to have a career at all. There were poets who had lost their jobs and poets who after a time had returned voluntarily to private life. But that a great poet should never have had a job at all was almost unprecedented. Some people no doubt thought that such a situation was highly discreditable to the Government. Others, like Wei Hao, believed that to have given him a job would only have been asking for trouble. Li Po himself, in a poem addressed to his wife, confesses that his drunkenness made him as good as no husband at all; but he never seems to have faced the fact that it also disqualified him for official service.

What is striking about all this is that admiration for the poet had already begun to overshadow reservations about the man in Li Po's own lifetime, as it has certainly continued to do since.

To a highly tradition-bound poetry, Li Po brought a sense of freedom and adventure. He showed an extraordinary ability to exploit the openness of the Chinese language, its gaps and implications, so that, reading his direct and simple poems, we find ourselves supplying their richness and exploring their implications. Arthur Cooper speaks of the way the line that translates literally as “drunk rise stalk brook moon” in the poem I have called “Indulgence” (“Abandon” is Cooper's title) fills out in our imaginations so that we know what kind of landscape it is set in and find ourselves acting it out and participating in its emotions to a surprising degree. One could multiply such examples endlessly. Li Po has an intuitive grasp of the genius of his language and its possibilities for poetry, and it is his exploitation of this understanding that allows us to return again and again to his apparently simple and unpretentious poems for refreshment, imaginative exhilaration, and a sense of their capacity to outlast the limitations of the life and circumstances that produced them.