Convergence of East-West Poetics: Williams’s Negotiation with the Chinese Landscape Tradition

The present book examines William Carlos Williams’s negotiation with cultural modes and systems of the Chinese landscape tradition in his landscape writing. Focusing on Walliams’s landscape modes of landscape with(out) infused emotions, the book builds a linkage between their interactions with Chinese landscape aesthetics and shows how these conversations helped shape Williams’s cross-cultural landscape poetics. The exploration of Williams’s experiment with the Chinese serene interplay of self and landscape, the interfusion of scene and emotion, an idea of seeing from the perspective of Wang Guowei’s theory of jingjie, and the poetic space of frustration and completion in the context of space and human geography, expand the understanding of a cross-cultural landscape tradition developed by Williams through bringing into focus the convergence of East-West poetics.

Zhanghui Yang is Associate Professor of American literature at Yunnan Normal University in China. He earned his doctorate from the University of Macau in 2021. His main research areas are China and modernism, literature and geography, with a special focus on the interaction of Chinese classical landscape poetry and landscape writing in American modernist poetry.