Writers › Writer / Poet
Liu Guo
Southern Song commoner poet from Taihe who failed the examinations repeatedly, urged plans for recovering the north, and wrote bold lyrics in the manner of his friend Xin Qiji
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Zi Gaizhi · Hao Long Zhou Dao Ren
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Liu Guo, courtesy name Gaizhi, sobriquet Longzhou Daoren, came from Taihe in Jizhou; he failed the examinations several times, never held office and spent much of his life travelling in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. He studied military affairs and wrote to the chief ministers with proposals for recovering the north, which were not taken up. He was close to Xin Qiji: Yue Ke's *Tingshi* tells how Xin, as pacification commissioner of eastern Zhejiang, invited him to visit, and Liu, unable to come, replied with a *Qinyuan chun* lyric imagining Bai Juyi, Lin Bu and Su Shi pulling him off to West Lake instead. His lyrics follow Xin's forthright and expansive manner, and later critics grouped him with Liu Kezhuang among Xin's school. He died at Kunshan in 1206, and his writings survive as the *Longzhou ji* and *Longzhou ci*.
Life and times
Dates 1154 CE–1206 CE