SOURCE: "Beginning with Images in the Nature Poetry of Wang Wei," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, June, 1982, pp. 117-36.

In the following essay, the critic argues that the nature poems contain "the essence of Wang Wei's achievement" and that they describe the relationship of landscape to poetry.

Wang Wei (701-61) is a poet whose reputation primarily rests on his nature poems. Although in the poems which have survived other themes are well represented—elaborate and perfect poems about the emperor's court, sentimental sketches of bucolic life, poems expressing friend ship—it is with the nature poems that his name is universally identified. The prominence given a handful of nature poems reflects both the judgment that they contain the essence of Wang Wei's achievement and an acknowledgment of the position they occupy in the evolution of nature poetry. The sense displayed in these poems of a life...