Li Po's "The Solitude of Night"
Today’s poem is the work of an eighth-century poet whose reputation didn’t peak until the twentieth century. Li Po’s “The Solitude of Night” (translated here by Shigeyoshi Obata) resembles Japanese haiku in its atmospheric brevity and is heavy with the kind of common-to-man melancholy the modernists would feel so deeply more than a millennium later.
A Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, Li Po (also known as Li Bai, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai) was probably born in central Asia and grew up in Sichuan Province. He left home in 725 to wander through the Yangtze River Valley and write…
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