PO CH-I

born 772, Hsin-cheng, Shensi province, China died 846, Lo-yang, now Honan, Honan province Pinyin Bo Juyi Chinese poet of the T'ang dynasty (618907) in China, who used his elegantly simple verse to protest the social evils of his day. Po Ch-i began composing poetry at the age of five. Because of his father's death in 794 and straitened family circumstances, Po did not take the official examinations for the bureaucracy until the late age of 28. He did extremely well and was given a minor post at the palace library, as was another successful examination candidate and poet, Yan Chen. Their friendship became perhaps the most famous in Chinese history. Po became a member of the prestigious Han-lin Academy in Ch'ang-an, the capital, in 807 and rose steadily in official life except for his banishment in 814 to a minor post at Chiu-chiang, the cause for which remains unclear. He assumed the important posts of governor of Chung-chou (818), Hangchow (822), and, later, Soochow. In 829 he became mayor of Lo-yang, the eastern capital, but retired from that post in 833 because of illness. Po Ch-i was the informal leader of a group of poets who rejected the courtly style of the time and emphasized the didactic function of literature, believing that every literary work should contain a fitting moral and a well-defined social purpose. Po considered his most important contributions to be his satirical ballads and social-protest poems, which usually took the form of free verse based on old folk ballads, or new yeh-fu, as he entitled a series of 50 of these poems. The most prolific of the T'ang poets, Po aimed for simplicity in his writing and, like Tu Fu, a great T'ang poet of the preceding generation, whom Po greatly admired, was deeply concerned with the social problems of the times.