Haoran Meng 孟浩然 (689/691 - 740)

Meng Haoran (Chinese: 孟浩然; pinyin: Mèng Hàorán; Wade–Giles : Meng Hao-jan; Japanese: Mōkōnen) was a major Tang Dynasty poet. Despite his brief pursuit of an official career, he mainly lived in and wrote about the area in which he was born and raised, in what is now the province of Hubei, China. Meng Haoran was a major influence on certain other contemporary and subsequent poets of the High Tang era because of his focus on nature as a main topic for poetry. Meng Haoran was also prominently featured in the Qing Dynasty (and subsequently frequently republished) poetry anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems, having the fifth largest number of his poems included, for a total of fifteen, exceeded only by Du Fu, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Li Shangyin.