Lǐ Hè 李賀 (790–816), zì Chángjí 長吉, called guǐcái 鬼才 (“ghost-genius”) and shīguǐ 詩鬼 (“poet-ghost”), was a distant descendant of the Táng imperial Zhèngwáng line, hence styled by ancestral seat Lǒngxī; in fact he lived at Chānggǔ 昌谷 (in modern Hénán Yíyáng), hence the title of his collection. He died at 27 (or 26 by Chinese count), his career derailed by a strained tabu on his attempting the jìnshì: his father’s name Jìnsù 晉肅 contained the same homonym (jìn = jìn-shì), and rivals exploited the huíbì (taboo-avoidance) doctrine to bar him. Hán Yù’s celebrated polemical defense, the Huìbiàn 諱辯, is addressed to this case but did not succeed in changing the outcome. He served briefly as Fènglǐláng (a sinecure post connected to the Tàicháng music-bureau) before retiring sick to Chānggǔ, where he died.
Lǐ Hè is the supremely strange voice in mid-Táng verse — fusing Chǔcí cosmology with Hànfù lexical density into a wholly new visionary idiom of demons, jewels, frosts, and metallic light. Dù Mù 杜牧’s preface to his collected verse is the locus classicus of his criticism. Lǐ Shāngyǐn’s 李商隱 Lǐ Chángjí xiǎozhuàn (composed several decades after his death) supplied the famous deathbed scene of summons to Heaven’s Báiyù lóu (Jade Tower) — the founding myth of the cáizǐ early-death type in Chinese letters.
Principal work in the corpus: Chānggǔ jí KR4c0060 (4 juǎn + wàijí 1 juǎn, 233 main + 23 supplementary poems), and the SBCK Gēshī biān 歌詩編 (KR4c0061) and the Sòng commentary Jiānzhù píngdiǎn Lǐ Chángjí gēshī of Wú Zhèngzǐ + Liú Chénwēng (KR4c0062).
CBDB (id 33485) gives 805–831, but those dates are erroneous; standard biographical sources (Xīn Tángshū wénxué zhuàn, Lǐ Shāngyǐn’s xiǎozhuàn, Dù Mù’s preface) and the catalog meta agree on 790–816, used here. The Yuánhé placement is also implicit in the Sìkù tíyào.