Collection of Liu Yuxi

Author: Zhao Juan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Liu Yuxi was a renowned litterateur, thinker, and statesman during the mid-Tang Dynasty. As a litterateur, Liu Yuxi composed over 800 poems in his lifetime, earning the title of "Poetic Master"; he also wrote hundreds of articles. Liu Zongyuan praised his works as "subtle yet rich, with an endless flavor that becomes even more apparent with repeated savoring" (from Liu Yuxi's A Warning to His Nephew Wei Shi). His poetry collection was highly esteemed by the Ming Dynasty scholar Yang Shen, who remarked: "After the Yuanhe era, among the complete poetry collections of renowned poets, Liu Yuxi stands out. His poems, both selected and widely admired, number no fewer than a hundred" (Sheng'an Poetry Notes, Volume 1). As a thinker, his philosophical ideas are reflected in his three essays On Heaven, Middle On Heaven, and Lower On Heaven, where he proposed the important viewpoint of "Heaven and humanity mutually prevail and complement each other," embodying the fighting spirit of a materialist and atheistic thinker. However, Liu Yuxi was not a successful statesman. The annotated works of Liu Yuxi we evaluate in this edition are primarily based on The Complete Tang Poems for his poems, while his prose is sourced from The Collected Works of Liu Binguo, a popular Qing Dynasty anthology Tengyu Series by Zhu Ji. We cross-reference The Complete Tang Prose and The Collected Works of Liu Yuxi with Annotations by Qu Tuoyuan, translating and adopting the best versions. The works are generally arranged in chronological order, but due to the constraints of the anthology's format and length, we have selectively annotated over 80 poems and more than 20 prose pieces from The Collected Works of Liu Yuxi.