In the poem he gives full play to his wild imaginings of spiritual pursuit, which greatly soothes a soul so frustrated with the real world. The concluding lines, "How can I serve the haughty with my head down? / No, I shall keep my heart buoyant and free forever, Oh!" resonates with his unyielding reputation as an upright scholar.

As a great national poet Li Bai showed a great concern about war. He expressed ardent praise for soldiers defending the country's frontiers and relentlessly castigated the warlike ruling class, as reflected in his poems "Song of the Frontier," "Wars at the South of the Town," and "The Song of Ding, the Protector-General." Li Bai also wrote many yuelu poems (poems imitating folksongs and ballads) describing the hardships of common people and expressing his deep sympathy for them; such poems include "The Ballad of Changgan" and "The Song of Wu by Zi Ye."

Li Bai's poems have great artistic appeal. As a romantic poet, he brought into play all means of romantic expression and achieved perfect unity between content and form in his poetry. Li Bai's poetry has an intense subjective and self-expressive tendency, and always presents his emotions with the momentum of an avalanche.

Extreme exaggeration, apt comparison, and profound imagination produced a high realism. When reading the lines "Slashing water with the blade of my sword, / it flows on all the more I raise my goblet, / drown my dolour deep, / yet it waxeth doubly sore," readers cannot help being moved by the despair amidst the grandiloquence. This expressive technique is especially seen in poems like "Traveling to Tianmu Mountain in a Dream: A Parting Song" and "Difficult is the way to Shu."

Li Bai often made extensive use of technique involving imagery, exaggeration, analogy, and personification in his poems,concocting a vision of fantasy and mystique, in language that is brisk, lively, and refined.

Li Bai's poetry was to profoundly influence the generations to come. Many famous poets, such as Han Yu, Meng Jiao, and Li He of the Tang Dynasty, Su Shi, Lu You, and Xin Qiji of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), and Gao Qi, Yang Shen, and Gong Zizhen of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), were all deeply affected by Li Bai's poetry.