A New Language for a New Perception: A Study of the Influence of Chinese Poetry on the Composition of Spring and All

Abstract

This essay highlights the numerous evidences of Chinese influences on Williams’s poetry, and particularly on the composition of Spring and All. What was it in Chinese poetry that could help Williams accomplish his poetic modernization which Pound was urging him to perform? In which ways and to which extent did Williams use Chinese poetic forms and concepts to compose his modernist masterpiece? As a continuation of the research of Wai-Lim Yip and Zhaoming Qian, two of the very few scholars who have focused their attention on this topic, this essay asks how much of what is seen by Western critics as poetic innovations by Williams can actually be seen as appropriations or derivations from Chinese language and poetics. It highlights that many of the poetic devices used in Spring and All, Williams’s breakthrough volume as a modernist, are actually either borrowed from traditional Chinese poetics, or result from the fusion of the English language with ideogramic linguistic concepts.