Li Yi, whose courtesy name was Junyu, originated from Guzang. In the fourth year of the Dali era under Emperor Daizong (769), he successfully passed the imperial examinations and attained the Advanced Scholar (Jinshi) degree. Initially appointed as the Registrar of Zheng County, he languished for a prolonged period without promotion or reassignment. Frustrated by this professional stagnation, he traveled north to the Hebei region, where the regional military commissioner Liu Ji recruited him as a staff member. During this tenure, Li Yi composed verses that contained subtle expressions of grievance and resentment regarding military life and political conditions. Under Emperor Xianzong, his literary fame brought him a recall to the capital, where he served as Assistant Minister of the Palace Secretariat and Academician of the Jixian Hall. However, possessing an overweening pride in his literary talents, he frequently slighted his colleagues and made himself unpopular among the official elite. Consequently, censors impeached him by citing his earlier frontier poetry containing critical sentiments, resulting in his demotion to a minor sinecure. He was later reinstated as Minister of the Palace Secretariat, subsequently advancing to Palace Attendant to the Crown Prince, Academician of the Jixian Hall, and Administrative Chief of the Institute, before culminating his official trajectory as Senior Cavalier Attendant in Ordinary. In the early Taihe era, he retired with the honorary rank of President of the Board of Rites and passed away shortly thereafter.
Li Yi excelled notably in song and regulated verse, achieving widespread acclaim during the Zhenyuan era alongside his kinsman Li He. His poetic output was so highly prized by contemporary society that entertainment quarters and imperial music bureaus would offer bribes to court musicians simply to obtain his latest compositions, which were then performed as imperial court songs. Such masterworks as The Frontier Soldier's Song and The Early Travel Lament captured the imagination of art patrons, who frequently commissioned painters to render his verses onto folding screens. His sophisticated manipulation of seven-character quatrains established his enduring reputation as a premier stylist of frontier melancholy and lamentation.
The existential and creative tension in Li Yi's oeuvre revolves around the classic Confucian conflict between ambitious statecraft and the bitter disillusionment of unrecognized talent. As an ambitious scholar who entered officialdom through rigorous examinations, he grappled constantly with the capricious nature of bureaucratic patronage and imperial favor. His poetry often mirrors the bleakness of the northern borderlands, reflecting an internal landscape defined by isolation, nostalgia, and the melancholic realization of human frailty against the vast backdrop of the Tang empire's military frontiers.
Li Yi's poetic corpus was preserved across imperial anthologies, notably culminating in two dedicated fascicles within the Comprehensive Tang Poems (Quan Tangshi). Traditional literary critics throughout the subsequent dynasties consistently lauded his mastery of musical verse and his unique ability to infuse conventional frontier themes with profound psychological depth. In modern international Sinology, his works remain vital touchstones for understanding the intersection of mid-Tang elite bureaucratic culture, musical performance, and regional militarism.