Affinities of forms: Chinese poets and Pope, Pound, Eliot and Williams

Abstract

Despite the tremendous linguistic particularities and cultural differences, Chinese poetry shares some formal and technical similarity with Anglo-American poetry. Through an effective use of the couplet-based verse form well suited for the play of parallelism and antithesis, classic Chinese poets and Alexander Pope achieve precision and concision in emotional and intellectual communications, making extremely precise distinctions between the elements of their thoughts or feelings. In terms of the "aesthetic form," "the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perceptions," a certain type of Chinese Tang poetry and poetry by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams display affinity, as manifested in the employment of juxtaposition to project a subjective state through presentation of external objects.