meaning literally the Great White Star. Thus it was that he was named Po (the White One), and surnamed Tai-po (the Great White One). Later he dubbed himself the Green Lotus Man, borrowing the name from a Buddhist saint; and sometimes went by the self-evident designation of the "Old Wine Genius."
When a boy of six Li Po could read, and by the age of ten he had mastered the Confucian books of the Odes and the History and miscellaneous classics by a hundred writers, and was composing poems of his own. While he was still in his teens, he retired with a recluse by the name of Tunyen-tzu to the mountain of Min in northern Ssuchuan. Here the two men kept strange birds as pets and succeeded in taming them to feed from their hands, the report of which brought to their hermitage the local magistrate, who invited them to enter the government service. But they declined. Our young poet sang contentedly:
For twenty springs I've lain among the clouds,
Loving leisure and enamored of the hills.
In 721 he traveled down the Yangtze to Yun-meng, the land of seven moors, that lies to the north of the river and the Tung-ting Lake; here he was married to a granddaughter of a certain ex-minister Hsu, and stayed there for three years.
Then he moved up north to Shantung, and made his home in Jen-cheng and elsewhere. "I am thirty," he wrote to a friend, "I make verses without tiring, while in front of my house carts and horses go by." Years passed without any visible achievement. One cannot blame too harshly his first wife who, impatient of the lack of his promotion, left him with the children. It
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