China and the West

William Carlos Williams : Allgemein
Quellen :
Brouner, Walter Brooks ; Mow, Fung Yuet. Chinese made easy. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1904).
Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest [ID D29063].
Fenollosa, Ernest. Instigations [ID D22141].
Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726].
The new poetry : an anthology. Ed. by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1918).
Pound, Ezra. Lustra [ID D29059].
Rexroth, Kenneth. One hundred poems from the Chinese [ID D29176].
Waley, Arthur. A hundred and seventy Chinese poems [ID D8884].

Sekundärliteratur
Henry W. Wells : William Carlos Williams's poetry is based on irony, paradox and contradiction. He became a violent partisan of the moral and aesthetic standards of the West and scarcely less in accord with those of the East. With the Chinese he cultivates violent transitions. Connectives are flagrantly omitted, stimulating imagination, prohibiting redundancy. Like the Chinese poets when seen through Western eyes, Williams tolerates no stale, flat, conventional word order. Like so many of his poems as well as poems by Du Fu and Li Bo, the subject is a landscape with a few buildings as supplementary features. The major theme is certainly the devastation of the landscape. Like the Chinese poets, he favors ambiguous, especially the earliest days of spring, when, in the chill, clear air one doubts whether spring has actually arrived or winter still lingers. His own verse does not even give evidence that he had at any time digested the full meaning of any Chinese poems. Some real influence, either direct or indirect, is highly probable and the close analogies are instructive for the reader of Williams of the typical Chinese poem, or of both.
It is certain that Williams had no conception of the 'fu' or of any of the more complex forms of Chinese verse. In general way Williams might have known of these poems but the probability is that even in this respect he remained thoroughly ignorant. There are striking analogies between his accomplishments as poet not only between his brief lyrics and the Chinese short poems but between his most complex art firms and those of the ancient Chinese. In their views of both art and life, in the practice of their craft and their attitudes toward living, they often hold remarkably similar positions. Williams's verse might not have been materially different from the achievement that it is had China remained in the twentieth century as unknown to the West as it was in the Middle Ages.