Liu Guo was a ci poet of the Southern Song dynasty. Very little is known about his life: his birth and death years, courtesy name, and native place are all unrecorded. Judging from the works that survive, he wrote mainly ci, dealing with personal reflections, travel and lodging, and poems exchanged with friends, often expressing grief over the rise and fall of the nation. His style is bold and free, at times somber and melancholy; he preferred direct expression of inner feeling to elaborate diction. The library holds two of his works, both titled Longzhou Ci (Lyrics of Longzhou), which is the main source for understanding his writing. Because public information is limited, biographical details cannot be given, yet on the evidence of his surviving ci, Liu Guo has a distinctive voice in Southern Song ci poetry, and his work has had some influence on later bold and unconstrained ci writing; his lyrics deserve close reading.
