Who was Li Po?
Li Po, also known as Li Bai, was a Chinese poet who lived from 701 to 762 AD. He was a fellow poet of Du Fu, and the pair are often considered to be the two greatest poets in the history of Chinese literature. Over 1,000 poems that Li Po wrote during his lifetime still exist today. Li Po was a man of wealth and spent much of his life traveling. In fact, many accounts of his life have him traveling through China for a great part of his time on earth. Although Li Po’s poems were all penned well over a millennium ago, they were not available to most parts of the western world until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys created the first translation of Po’s poems into a Western language with his book Poésies de l’Époque des Thang, a French publication that was released in 1862. The first English translation of Li Po’s poems was published by Herbert Allen Giles in his text titled History of Chinese Literature, which was made available to the reading public
