Wang Bo, Yang Jiong, Lu Zhaolin and Luo Bingwang, four renowned poets in the Early Tang Dynasty (618-907), were honored "the Four Preeminent Poets of the Early Tang Dynasty".
Wang Bo (649 or 650 - 675 or 676), a native of Longmen, Jiangzhou (present-day Hejing County, Shanxi Province), was especially intelligent in his childhood. Regarded as a prodigy, he began writing at the age of nine, and by fourteen he was able to produce the most eminent proseA Eulogy to Tengwang Pavilion. He mainly wroteLushi(a poem of eight lines, each containing five or seven characters, with a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme) andJueju(a poem of four lines, each containing five or seven characters, with a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme). His famous line "The person at ultima thule but still as close as a good neighbor is your true friend" has been widely used to describe bosom friends living far from each other. His poems display as much freshness and spontaneity as simplicity and naturalness.
Luo Binwang (640?-684), a native of Yiwu, Wuzhou (present-day Yiwu County, Zhejiang Province), was by special grace able to compose poems as early as at the age of seven. His poems are neatly and carefully composed with rigid rhyme schemes and in elegant language. As an early Tang poet, Luo contributed to the shaping of the poetic style, which later prevailed throughout the dynasty, forming a glorious page in the history of Chinese poetry.
Yang Jiong (650-?) was famous for his poems describing life at the frontier and only 33 of his poems can be found today. Lu Zhaolin (around 636-695) was born in Fanyang, Youzhou. He was renowned for hisGexingti(a flexible form of classical poem that can be set to music and sung) poems.
The Four Preeminent Poets of the Early Tang Dynasty were equally famous for their rhythmical prose characterized by parallelism and ornateness, and descriptive prose interspersed with verse. Although they inherited the affected poetry style of the period of the Qi (479-502) and Liang (502-557), they broke through the narrow confines of subject matter for poetry and helped establish the poetic form that had eight lines with each containing five characters.
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