Li Bai studied very hard and had an ambition to serve the country in his youth. But he became disillusioned with the orthodox ladder to success through officialdom. He devoted himself to traveling, drinking and writing poems. Many of his poems eulogize China's scenery. For example, he describes the vastness of the Yangtze as follows: "The lonely sail disappears in the distance, leaving the sky clear and blue/ There remains nothing but the Yangtze flowing to the horizon."Of the Yellow River he writes, "The waters of the Yellow River come down from Heaven/ Rushing to the sea, never to come back". He says of the Lushan waterfall: "Its dashes down three thousand feet from high/ As if the Milky Way has fallen from the azure sky."Another poem of his describes his longing for his hometown in the dead of night: "The bright moonlight before my bed/ I thought was frost on the floor/ When I raised my eyes I saw the moon gleaming/ When I dropped my head, I thought of my hometown ? He was spoken of as the "poet immortal"by people of his time.

Du Fu lived in the period when the Tang Dynasty had passed its days of glory and was heading toward decline. Like Li Bai, Du Fu traveled a lot in his youth. He met Li Bai in Luoyang, and they became good friends. Also like Li Bai, Du Fu's ambition was thwarted, and his life was full of suffering. His poems describe a sophisticated but changing society. For example, "The fragrance of meat and wine exudes from rich men's houses/While the poor die of cold and hunger in the streets"and "The country has fallen into the enemy's hands/ Yet the rivers and mountains are still here/ Spring has come to the city/ Where trees and grass grow exuberantly". These famous verses have been remembered and recited for centuries. Du Fu's poems are grave and melancholy. The succinct language he uses reaches a very high artistic level, and influenced numerous poets after him. He was called the "sage poet" by later generations.

When he was just a teenager, Bai Juyi wrote famous verses like "The grass on the vast prairie lives and dies every year/ Fire cannot burn it all/ When the spring wind blows/ It will grow again". His poems are easy to understand, and were popular in his lifetime. It is said that after he wrote a poem he first read it to an old woman. He would amend it until the old woman could understand it. Of his profuse works, the most famous are the long narrative poems The Everlasting Regret and Song of a Pipa (Lute Player).