Born: 1084, Jinan, Shandong province, China
Died: after 1155, Jinhua, Zhejiang province
Li Qingzhao or Li Ch’ingchao was the best-known female poet writing in China prior to the 20th century. She wrote primarily in a poetic form known as the song lyric (ci or tz’u) in which new words were composed for singing to familiar melodies. The genre was popular from the 11th century to the 13th century. She infused its stylized language with a sense of spontaneity and genuine emotion.
Li Qingzhao was born into a literary family and received an excellent education in traditional Confucian learning. She shared literary and scholarly interests with her husband, Zhao Mingchen. According to her own description, her early married years were idyllic; she and her husband were matched in both intellect and literary ability. In 1127, Jurchen tribes from the north invaded and conquered much of northern China, forcing the couple to flee southward, carrying with them their huge collection of books and antiques. In 1129 Zhao Mingchen died, and Li Qingzhao moved from place to place, following the political fortunes of the time. Although it is said that she later remarried yet little is known of her last years.
The song lyric genre in which Li Qingzhao composed all her most famous poems was formally demanding. It required great technical precision, in which Li Qingzhao took particular pride. At the same time, its highest goal was to achieve the ease and direct language of speech. The best song lyrics should sound like everyday speech but be phrased so perfectly that not a word could be changed or omitted. This quality comes through perfectly in Li Qingzhao’s most famous lyric, “Sheng-sheng man” (“Every Note Slow”), in which she evokes a mood of melancholy and closes by talking about how such words as sorrow or melancholy fail to describe the feeling adequately. The implicit message of the lyric is that feeling can be expressed only in the way one speaks about things and not merely in the words used for categorizing feelings.
Although fewer than a hundred of Li Qingzhao’s song lyrics survive, they are considered among the finest examples of the form. The unique combination of self-discipline and naturalness in her poems served as an important model for a fuller development of women’s literature in China during the 16th and 17th centuries.
