SOURCE: “Li Po,” in Five T'ang Poets, Oberlin College Press, 1990, pp. 45-52.

In the following introduction to the Li Po section in his translation of the works of five T’ang poets, Young remarks on Li Po's sense of intoxication, freedom, and adventure, and discusses the poet's distinctive treatment of traditional themes.

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...