Writers › Writer / Poet
Li He
Mid-Tang poet of a fallen branch of the imperial clan, barred from the examinations by a taboo on his father's name, whose dark, strange imagery later earned him the name ghost of poetry
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 Zhangji · Shi Gui · Tangzhu Wangsun
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Li He, courtesy name Changji, came from Changgu in Fuchang county; his remote ancestor was Li Liang, Prince of Zheng and uncle of the Tang founder, but the family had long since declined. The New Tang History says Han Yu and Huangfu Shi visited him as a youth and watched him dash off a poem. When he was put forward for the metropolitan examination, rivals objected that his father's name, Jinsu, sounded like jinshi, the degree itself; Han Yu answered them in his essay On Taboo Names, but Li never took the degree and rose no higher than a minor ritual post. Li Shangyin's short biography describes him riding out on a donkey with an old brocade bag, dropping each new line into it, while his mother said the boy would not stop until he had vomited out his heart. He died at twenty-seven, by one reckoning in 817. Du Mu, prefacing his poems, called them descendants of the Li sao.
Life and times
Dates c. 791 CE–c. 817 CE (by another account 790–816)