five The Legacy of Li He In 816, in the eleventh year of the Yuanhe Reign, Li He died at the age of twenty-six (twenty-seven according to Chinese reckoning).1 Given his brief poetic career, his surviving poetic output of over two hundred poems is considerable. Li He’s was a singular and distinctive style, shar- ing qualities with some of his Yuanhe contemporaries, like Lu Tong 盧仝, and more generally enabled by the remarkable spirit of poetic daring and inventiveness in the last decade of the eighth century and first two decades of the ninth. By 820 the Yuanhe Reign was over. The inventiveness of the era had been exhausted, with poetry taking a de- cidedly conservative turn. Li He died without poetic issue, as he died childless in the more lit- eral sense. These two forms of progeny are not entirely unrelated: pre- paring a poet’s “literary remains” (which is what Tang literary collec- tions generally were before the second quarter of the ninth century) was a task that often fell to a writer’s son. Writers would sometimes entrust their collected works to friends, particularly if their children were not especially literary and lacked the connections to ensure the dissemina- tion of the collection. This is what Li Bai had done. Li He seems to have done the same, presenting a manuscript of his poems to his then- young friend Shen Shushi 沈述師.2 Li He’s choice was not a wise one—except in the odd way that things sometimes work out for the best in the long run. Shen Shushi kept the manuscript and soon forgot about it. It apparently accompanied his ————— 1. Li Shangyin erroneously says that he died at twenty-four sui, a number frequently cited in earlier Chinese commentaries. 2. It is possible that other copies of the manuscript were given to others. It is likely that some of the poems circulated independently. The Legacy of Li He 157 personal baggage for about fifteen years. One night in November or early December 831, while staying at his brother’s post in Xuanzhou, Shen had been drinking and could not fall asleep. While rummaging through his trunks, he found Li He’s poems. Obviously sentimental from his drinking, Shen felt guilt over his neglect, having failed to fulfill the most obvious responsibility of any editor of literary remains, namely, to supply the collection with a preface by a known literary fig- ure. A friend came to mind, a promising young writer of twenty-nine, also in the employ of his brother. Deciding to act while the matter was still on his mind, Shen took the rather unusual step of sending a midnight messenger over to Du Mu’s lodgings to ask him to write a preface. Du Mu, understandably startled by this late-night request, refused. Shen continued to press him until Du Mu finally agreed, producing what is certainly the strangest preface in Tang literature. Prefaces often included accounts of how the writer was petitioned to undertake his task, so it is not entirely surprising that Du Mu gave an account of the story of the manuscript—though it was an unusual one. What sets Du Mu’s preface apart from virtually all others is the fact that he clearly disapproved of Li He’s poetry. Du Mu concludes: These are indeed the remote descendents of the Sao; and although they are not its equal in the order of things (li 理), they go beyond it in diction. The Sao is stirred to resentment and makes furious jabs; its words touch on order (li 理) and disorder in the relation between prince and minister, sometimes provoking thoughts in the reader. In what Li He wrote, however, there is none of this. Li He was skilled at digging out past events; thus his deep sighs expressed bitter- ness at what no one had ever spoken of in present or past times. In pieces like “The Bronze Immortals Take Leave of Han” or “Supplying the Missing ‘Palace-Style Ballad’ of Yu Jianwu of the Liang” he sought to capture the qual- ity and manner [of the moment]; yet he departed so far from the usual paths of letters that one scarcely knows of them. Li He died in the twenty-seventh year of his age. People of the time all said, “Had Li He not died and improved somewhat in his sense of the order of things, he might have commanded the Sao as a servant.”3 The last sentence is left purposely ambiguous as to who is the servant. Even if we read this passage in its most generous sense, the praise is ————— 3. Fanchuan wenji 149. .