SOURCE: Howard S. Levy, in Translations from Po Chü-i's Collected Works, translated and described by Howard S. Levy, Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1970, 181 p.

In the following excerpt, Levy surveys several groups of Po Chü-i's poetry—including those of social criticism, in praise of pleasure and drinking, and lamenting aging and death—and explores their influence on Japanese literature.

Chapter 3the Poems of Social Criticism and Class Consciousness

… Po Chü-i had a great sympathy for the weak and the exploited, and he scorned those who oppressed the multitudes and profited at their expense. In his didactic poems, as an ally of the weak he frequently made appeals to the throne to relieve their sufferings. These are the poems of early maturity, written in his late thirties while he was serving at court as an imperial critic. They embody an early conviction that the poetic mission should...