[1] Mei Yaochen was born in Xuancheng in present-day Anhui Province.

[1] He passed the jinshi exam in 1051 and had a career in the civil service, but was unsuccessful.

Most of his works are in the shi form, but they are much freer in content than those of the Tang dynasty.

His response to the impossibility of surpassing the Tang poets was to make a virtue of his lack of ambition; his ideal was 平淡 (pingdan), or the pedestrian.

An example is his poem translated into English by Kenneth Rexroth as "An Excuse for Not Returning the Visit of a Friend."