Page:The poet Li Po - Waley.djvu/9

Rh greatest poets, put Li Po fourth on the list. Many vulgar people expressed surprise, but Wang replied: 'The reason why vulgar people find Li Po's poetry congenial is that it is easy to enjoy. His intellectual outlook was mean and sordid, and out of ten poems nine deal with wine or women; nevertheless, the abundance of his talent makes it impossible to leave him out of account.' "

Finally Huang T'ing-chien (A.D. 1050-1110), accepted by the Chinese as one of their greatest writers, says with reference to Li's poetry: "The quest for unusual expressions is in itself a literary disease. It was, indeed, this fashion which caused the decay which set in after the Chien-an period (i.e., at the beginning of the third century A.D.)."

To these native strictures very little need be added. No one who reads much of Li's poetry in the original can fail to notice the two defects which are emphasized by the Sung critics. The long poems are often ill-constructed. Where, for example, he wishes to convey an impression of horror he is apt to exhaust himself in the first quatrain, and the rest of the poem is a network of straggling repetitions. Very few of these longer poems have been translated. The second defect, his lack of variety, is one which would only strike those who have read a large number of his poems. Translators have naturally made their selections as varied as possible, so that many of those who know the poet only in translation might feel inclined to defend him on this score. According to Wang An-shih, his two subjects are wine and women. The second does not, of course, imply love-poetry, but sentiments put into the mouths of deserted wives and concubines. Such themes are always felt by the Chinese to be in part allegorical, the deserted lady symbolizing the minister whose counsels a wicked monarch will not heed.

Such poems form the dullest section of Chinese poetry, and are certainly frequent in Li's works. But his most monotonous feature is the mechanical recurrence of certain