In 744, two years after serving the court as Special Imperial Poet Laureate, Li Bai left the court and spent most of the ensuing ten years, wandering in the east and southeast of China.
The catastrophic An-Lushan Rebellion broke out in 755. Unwittingly Li Bai involved himself in a power struggle for supremacy between the Crown Prince and one of his younger brothers, Prince Yong. Li Bai joined the camp of Prince Yong and served as a civilian advisor to the prince. In the end Prince Yong was defeated by the Crown Prince, who ascended the throne, becoming the new emperor of the Tang Dynasty. For his service to Prince Yong, Li Bai was convicted and sentenced in 757 to be sent in exile to the southeastern corner of China, a virtual jungle during the 8th century. On his way upstream the Yangtze River to the destination of his banishment in the 1st lunar month of 759, however, Li Bai was granted an imperial pardon.
Down and out thereafter, Li Bai drifted and depended on the kindness of one patron to the other. Though homeless, childless, and penniless, however, the old man was not a bit less of a youthful and hopeful bon-vivant at heart, as he always had been, nor was it any lesser as for the essential spirit of insouciance and the vehemence of his poetic works. In the poems he composed during these final years, he imagined himself returning happily to his native home in the sky, or returning to Nothingness, even for just a brief moment, to go on singing about Nature and a life of freedom in adamant defiance against old age, illness, despair, pain, and the imminent darkness.
All the poems selected to study in Li Bai (Part 3) by Li Bai, now in his twilight years, would bring to mind the final lines of East Coker by T.S. Eliot:
“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
Clearly, Courage is the guiding spirit of Li Bai which is reflected in these selected poems and in the above lines by Eliot, despite the more than one thousand years of time gap between them. It’s in fact shared by all poets and artists in the world: artists whose search for beauty and truth must be based on Courage, and, indeed, the end of life for Li Bai, like that for Eliot, will not be the end, but the beginning of another wave of rising artists in pursuit of Courage, from which come poetry and beauty. There’s no end, no end to beauty, truth, and above all, poetry.
Class Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
January 7 – March 18 (No class on January 28, Lunar New Year Eve)
10 sessions (20 hours)
$550 member / $590 non-member
(plus a $30 non-refundable registration fee)
This class will be taught in English.
Ben Wang: Senior Lecturer in Language and Humanities at China Institute, Co-Chair of Renwen Society of China Institute, retired Instructor of Chinese at the United Nations Language Program. A published writer on classical Chinese poetry and others, Ben Wang is an award winning translator both from Chinese into English and vice versa; He taught Chinese and translation at Columbia University, New York University, Pace University and City University of New York between 1969 and 1991.
Ben Wang teaches and lectures on the Chinese language, calligraphy, and classical Chinese literature, including the Book of Songs, the Songs of the South; Han, Tang and Song poetry; Yuan and Ming poetic dramas; Story of the Stone of the Qing; classical Kunqu Drama and Beijing Opera; Literati Painting. Ben Wang’s lectures on and translations of Kunqu dramas have been reviewed and acclaimed three times in the New York Times by the Times’ music and drama critic James Oestreich as “magnificent,” “captivating,” and “colorful.”
Since 1989, Ben Wang has lectured (extensively on the above-mentioned subjects）at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, Williams, U.C. Berkeley, New York University, Bates, Colby, Hamilton, Middlebury, Rutgers, Seton Hall, St. Mary’s College in California, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, United Nations, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, ABC Nightline, the BBC, among other academic and cultural institutions.
Latest publications in English:
(Published by China Institute and Released by Tuttle Publishing; 2014, 2015, the series has garnered 9 US book awards, as of September 2016.)
(January 2019)
