The three Chinese poets translated here are among the greatest literary figures of China, or indeed the world. Wang Wei with his quiet love of nature and Buddhist philosophy; Li Bai, the Taoist spirit, with his wild, flamboyant paeans to wine and the moon; and Du Fu, with his Confucian sense of sympathy with the suffering of others in a time of civil war and collapse.

These three poets of a single generation, responding differently to their common times, crystallise the immense variety of China and the Chinese poetic tradition and, across a distance of twelve hundred years, move the reader as it is rare for even poetry to do.