Short answers, pulled from the story.
Li Bai, born around 701 and died in 762, was a Chinese poet acclaimed as one of the most important poets of the Tang dynasty and of all Chinese poetry. He was known by his courtesy name Taibai and by nicknames such as the Immortal of Poetry and the Wine Immortal. Around 1,000 of his poems survive.
Li Bai is generally considered to have been born in 701 in Suyab, a Silk Road city in ancient Chinese Central Asia, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, where his merchant family prospered at the frontier. When he was about four or five, his father moved the family to Jiangyou near Chengdu, in Sichuan, where Li spent his childhood in the town of Qinglian.
Li Bai was sent away from the court of Emperor Xuanzong after the eunuch Gao Lishi took offense at being asked to remove the poet's muddy boots. Gao then persuaded the consort Yang Guifei to resent Li's poems about her, and the Emperor reluctantly dismissed him with large gifts of gold and silver.
Li Bai died sometime in 762 in Dangtu, Anhui, with the exact date and cause lost to history. The Tang poet Pi Rixiu suggested he died of chronic thoracic suppuration, while another account holds that he drowned after falling from his boat while drunk, trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangtze River.
Among Li Bai's most famous poems are Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day, The Hard Road to Shu, Bring in the Wine, and Quiet Night Thought, which are still taught in schools in China. Quiet Night Thought uses moonlight and frost imagery in just 20 words to convey homesickness.
Li Bai influenced the West through Ezra Pound's collection Cathay in 1915, where his poems made up eleven of the nineteen pieces. The Austrian composer Gustav Mahler set German adaptations of four of Li's poems in his song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde in 1908, and other composers including Harry Partch and Volkmar Andreae set his work as well.
Li Bai met the poet Du Fu in the autumn of 744, when they shared a room and traveled, hunted, drank, and wrote poetry together, forming a close and lasting friendship. They met again the following year, the only times they met in person, though they maintained their relationship through poetry afterward.