The Collected Poems of Li He-Quality Guarantee

Description

The definitive collection of works by one of the Tang Dynasty’s most eccentric (and badly-behaved) poets, now back in print for the first time in decades.

Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing atthe age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according toa later commentator, “sexual dissipation,” or both. An obscure andunsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawnon horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servantboy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag.

Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li Hewas virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentiethcentury. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes,“Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks forour disconcerting times.” Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud,Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl.

The Collected Poems of Li He isthe only comprehensive selection of his surviving work (most of hispoems were reputedly burned by his cousin after his death, for the honorof the family), rendered here in crystalline translations by the notedscholar J. D. Frodsham.