Mountain and Moonlight: The Poetic Vision of Mickiewicz and Li Bai A Preprint

This study presents the first systematic comparison of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Poland's national poet, and Li Bai (701–762), China's poet of moonlight and wandering. Despite belonging to radically different cultural traditions separated by over a millennium, these two poets share profound affinities that have never been explored in scholarly literature. Both poets lived lives of wandering. Mickiewicz was forced into exile after political repression, spending most of his adult life in Russia, Germany, Italy, and France, never permitted to return to his homeland. Li Bai spent his life traveling through the rivers and mountains of Tang China, never finding a permanent home, always longing for a place to belong. Both became the voice of their nations. Mickiewicz's epic Pan Tadeusz is considered Poland's national epic, capturing the spirit of a nation that had lost its political independence. Li Bai's poems became the voice of Tang China's golden age, sung by generations of Chinese readers. Both transformed personal suffering into universal poetry. Mickiewicz wrote of exile, longing, and the hope for national resurrection. Li Bai wrote of solitude, friendship, and the transcendence found in wine and moonlight. Both found in the natural world—Mickiewicz in the mountains of his homeland, Li Bai in the moonlight that accompanied his wanderings—a language for the deepest human emotions. The author first encountered Mickiewicz through Chopin's Ballades as a young pianist. That early connection has now evolved into this comparative study, a journey that feels deeply meaningful. Through close reading of canonical poems, I argue that their shared "poetics of wandering" offers a unique window into the dialogue between Eastern and Western lyric traditions. The study contributes to comparative poetics by opening a new frontier in Polish-Chinese literary relations, a field that remains virtually unexplored. Keywords: , , , , ,,y,