Leader of mid-Tang poetry, the plain style "an old woman could understand"
The most celebrated poet of the mid-Tang, who held that poetry should be "written for the times, made for events," mirroring the sufferings of the people. He strove for plainness — he is said to have read a finished poem aloud to an illiterate old woman and, if she could not understand it, revised until anyone could. His long narrative poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow tells the life-and-death love of Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei; Song of the Pipa borrows a fallen singer’s life to sigh "we are both wanderers at the ends of the earth." His work is beloved across East Asia.
Demoted to Jiangzhou, Bai Juyi met on a boat an aging pipa player, her beauty faded, drifting through the rivers and lakes. Hearing her play and tell her life, he wrote "we are both wanderers at the ends of the earth; why need we have known each other before we meet?" A frustrated official and a drifting singer recognized each other’s fate in the music — this shared feeling moved a thousand years.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.