Nature and Self: A Study of the Poetry of Su Dongpo with Comparisons to the Poetry of William Wordsworth.

• Author: Pease, Jonathan

When Su Shi (1037-1101) looked over the gunwale of his boat, "100 Dongpos" smiled back at him (Yang, p. 157). William Wordsworth (1770-1850), also gazing down from a boat, saw "weeds, fishes, flowers," among which flickered a single, perplexed Wordsworth (p. 164). This pair of matching images, with their different implications, sums up the seduction and frustration of comparing writers across centuries and continents. Such comparison is a worthy enterprise, and a brave one because its pitfalls can be as wide as the cultural gulf between Asia and the West, between ourselves and ancient times, and between two poets, one of whom wrote about his own work in terms rather similar to those used by English professors now, while the other wrote much less about the act of writing, so that often we can only infer what he thought.

A carefully constructed methodology can bridge, mend, or sidestep such pitfalls. But even the best methodology does not reduce the need to be familiar with both traditions in all their daunting complexity. Vincent Yang's study of Su Shi and William Wordsworth is based on neither a secure methodology nor a thorough grounding in literary history. It wavers between comparing Wordsworth with Su and China with the West. It does not distinguish carefully between poets as human beings and poets as voices. It does not define nature clearly, especially in Su's case, so that we have no secure premise from which to start comparing Wordsworth's view of it with Su's view. Was nature ziran for Su, or was it tian? How are we supposed to define "self"? Would it not be better first to compare the two poets' treatment of things that both men's poems actually name, and whose Chinese and English names correspond - things such as "mountain," "field," "leisure," or "home," for example? Wordsworth, the secondary object of study, is quoted in such fragmentary ways that we barely learn what Yang thinks of him. Su Shi is described more fully, with generous doses of complete poems translated into coherent, straightforward English with competent, though sometimes rather brief, analysis. But the view of Chinese literary history, and the conclusions drawn about Su from it, are shallow, imprecise, and sometimes rather hard to believe. Are we to think that Su Shi loved nature and disliked society (p. 20)? This is probably not true even of Wordsworth; if true, it is rather vaguely stated. Did Su Shi really cherish a "lifelong dream of seceding from the human...