Li Bai (701 – 762), also known as Li Bo (or Li Po), is a Chinese poet acclaimed from his own day to the present as a genius and romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights.
He and his friend Du Fu (712-770) are the two most prominent figures in the flourishing of Chinese poetry in the mid-Tang Dynasty that is often called the "Golden Age."
Around a thousand poems attributed to him are extant, thirty-four in the canonical 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems.
The poems are models for celebrating the pleasures of friendship, the depth of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking wine.
Among the most famous are "Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day", "The Hard Road to Shu", and "Quiet Night Thought", which appear frequently in school texts in China today.
Legend holds that Li drowned when he reached from his boat to grasp the moon’s reflection in the river.
