A Study on Seo Geo-jeong’s Sentiments for Li Bai in His Chinese Poems

As a famous official in the early Joseon Dynasty, Seo Geo-jeong served six Korean kings throughout his life. He was proficient in literature, history and geography, and wrote more than 10,000 poems. He received considerable attention from the monarchs at that time. However, the current academic research on its literary aspects does not seem to be very sufficient. Therefore, this article analyzes the 42 poems that directly use ‘Li Bai’ in them focusing on Li Bai's influence on Seo Geo-jeong's Chinese poetry creation.<br/> The creative state of Seo Geo-jeong shown in these 42 poems is that he is best at writing seven-character Lüshi and is not very fond of using the five-character form. Seo Geo-jeong admired Li Bai's poetic talent the most, and also appreciate Li Bai's unruly drunkenness and heroic spirit. Li Bai's poems appeared in all aspects of Seo Geo-jeong's life. The image of Li Bai also often appears in his poems, and the frequency of appearing alone is relatively low. More often, it appears in correspondence with other poets, such as Su Shi, He Zhizhang, Wang Can, Tao Qian, Vimalakirti, Jiang Yan, Qu Yuan, Lu Tong, Wei Yingwu, Chen Deng, and Yaoli Deng. Rather than comparing himself to Li Bai, Seo Geo-jeong prefers to use Li Bai to compare his friends to show the highest respect. Although Li Bai is Seo Geo-jeong's idol in his poetry creation, he was often troubled by officialdom and used it to release his inner loneliness and express his desire for leisure and freedom.