雍陶

Yong Tao was a poet of the Tang dynasty. His life is now obscure: his nationality and dates of birth and death are unrecorded, and available public information is limited. Judging from the works held in the collection, he was skilled in both five- and seven-character poetry, and his subjects often involve farewells, travel, and landscapes. "Seeing Off Commissioner Xu on His Way to Yuezhou" centers on a farewell, expressing encouragement to a friend and imagining the long journey ahead, while "Traveling Through the Gorges" records what he saw and felt while sailing the Three Gorges. His style is concise, good at using scenery to set off emotion, and shows a clear, brisk naturalness. Yong Tao's poems circulated to some degree in his own time and later, and are classed among classical poetry and classic works; he is a useful reference for the study of poetry in the mid-to-late Tang. Because historical sources are scattered, the details of his life are hard to verify, and readers can chiefly appreciate his art of describing scenery and expressing feeling through his surviving poems.