Finest Souls of Our Rivers and Alps

The “High Tang” is the period long renowned as the golden age of Chinese poetry. This book is the first translation into any language of the only extant anthology compiled contemporaneously that was solely devoted to poetry composed during that period. It contains 230 poems by 24 different poets and was completed around 753, providing a rare contemporary view of what one well-informed reader considered the best verse of the age. The selections are of poems in various lengths, forms, and styles. The poets represented include most of those recognized since then as the greatest writers of the time, as well as those who seem largely forgotten now but who were in their own day held in equally high regard.