Wang Wei
Wang Wei (701–761 C.E.) is often considered on of the three greatest poets in China’s 3,000-year poetic tradition. He was the master of the short imagistic landscape poem.
The Selected Poems Of Wang Wei
by Wang Wei
Translated from the Classical Chinese by David Hinton
Wang Wei (701-761 C.E.) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China’s 3,000-year poetic tradition. Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed a nature poetry of resounding tranquility wherein deep understanding goes far beyond the words on the page—a poetics that can be traced to his assiduous practice of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism.…
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In the most penetrating moments of these poems, however various they are, Wang takes the poem beyond words on the page, as he returns consciousness to its most elemental and resounding dimensions of emptiness and landscape. The result is a breathtaking poetry.—David Hinton
Wang Wei is one of those model poets, personally and artistically flawless, who occur very rarely in the history of literature.—Kenneth Rexroth
