Li Bai - the Hypocritical Poet

Portrait of Li Bai Li Bai, the spiritual idol of the Chinese people, what do we love about him? Is he the sword-wielding dream chaser who says "there will be times when the wind and waves break, and the clouds and sails will sail across the sea"? Is he the proud madman who "looks up to the sky laughing and goes out, how can I be a Penghao person"? Or is he the knight-errant who wrote, "Kill a person in ten steps, leave no trace for a thousand miles, throw away his clothes when the matter is over, and hide his name and identity"? In fact, many times, he is just a reality evader who "uses alcohol to drown his sorrows and make them worse." He is a down-and-out drunkard who "was as drunk as mud every day for three hundred and sixty days." He is also the lonely wanderer who "looks up at the bright moon and lowers his head to miss his hometown." However, all this is him, but it is not all him. If the definition of him is limited to a few well-known poems, it would be narrow. In front of the world, he looked down at the princes and said boldly, "An Neng can crush his eyebrows and bend his waist to serve the powerful." But in front of the powerful, he was extremely humble and flattering. He wrote with extreme humility, "I don't want to be granted the title of Marquis of Ten Thousand Households in my life, but I hope to get to know Han Jingzhou." The real Li Bai is complicated. Reading his works by Qian Ye, You will find that most of his madness is fake, but his charm is real. He is definitely not the otherworldly and unworldly "immortal" in poetry. He is also not a thousand-mile horse who fails to recognize his talents and is solitary and admiring himself. Peeling away the filter of poetry, he is just an "ordinary man" who can only write poetry. He has flesh and blood, desires and struggles, arrogance and compromise. It is this intertwined worldly attitude of humility and pride when facing different classes, Only then did he become the hypocritical and slightly naive Li Bai.