Landscape and Seeing in Williams's Poetry: A Chinese Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay aims to investigate William Carlos Williams's interaction with Chinese landscape aesthetics by arguing that he adapted an idea of seeing prevalent in Chinese landscape poetry into his own poetics. Seeing, meaning zhiguan (直观 direct observation and perception), is an important way of accessing nature's "sufficiency" in Daoist philosophy. Williams blends the idea of seeing into his important collection Sour Grapes, which prompted him to theorize it further in the prose fragments of Spring and All. Seeing and sufficiency are rephrased by Ezra Pound as "direct treatment of the thing" and "completeness," and are developed by Williams far beyond Pound's applications into his work, notably in Williams's two versions of "The Locust Tree in Flower."