Collected Poems
Li Bai is the most beloved poet of the Chinese tradition, possibly of world literature. Spontaneous, dazzlingly imagistic, drunken with moonlight and friendship and the road, his poems of wine, exile, and mountains feel simultaneously intimate and cosmic. "Quiet Night Thoughts," four lines about moonlight and homesickness, has been memorized by Chinese schoolchildren for 1,300 years.
Moon, wine, mountain, goodbye; repeat for a thousand poems. Li Bai's spontaneity, in English, often lands as pleasant slightness, and his reputation there was partly built on Pound's Cathay, gorgeous mistranslations from a man who read no Chinese. Attribution is a mess besides; a real chunk of the canon may not be his. The persona charms; it rarely deepens.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
