poem to someone

Question

Even in a laudatory poem to famous Chinese poet Li Po, which partly serves to place Lum's work within a distinguished literary tradition, Lum refuses to offer a stereotypical nostalgia for the past.

This sentence is from one of the LSAT preptests, and I wanted to check whether I am understanding this sentence correctly, as it includes lots of information in a single sentence.

Lum wrote a poem that praise Chinese poet Li Po. This poem effected Lum's other works to be distinguished from other common traditional literary poems. In the poem, stereotypical nostalgia for the past is not included.

Am I understanding it correctly?

Answer 1

Not quite. The author acknowledges that Lum's poem on Li Po lies within a particular literary tradition, is a piece of that tradition; but the author also insists that even in this traditional poem Lum's treatment of Li Po transcends the literary convention of nostalgia for the past.