words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

slight angle to universe

They turn and see a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe…He may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve, a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behavior of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or with the dialects of the interior of a Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet…

E. M. Forster’s description of C. P. Cavafy, related in Marguerite Yourcenar’s “A Critical Introduction to Cavafy,” The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984)

worlds and worlds

From the concepts of ‘emotion and scene’ and ‘spirit and tone’, Wang Kuo-wei derived his theory of ‘worlds’ in poetry. The term I have translated as ‘world’, ching-chieh, is itself a translation of the Sanskrit word visaya, which in Buddhist terminology means ‘sphere’ or ‘spiritual domain’. Wang Kuo-wei was not the first to apply it to poetry, but he was the first to use it systematically and to give it something like a definition:

     The ‘world’ does not refer to scenes and objects only; joy, anger, sadness, and happiness also form a world in a human heart. Therefore poetry that can describe true scenes and true emotions may be said to ‘have a world’; otherwise it may be said ‘not to have a world’.

This ‘world’ is in fact a fusion of emotion and scene, and the concept is obviously derived from Wang Fu-chih’s ‘emotion and scene’, though now given a new name. Wang Kuo-wei distinguishes those who ‘create worlds’ in poetry from those who only ‘describe’ them:

     There are some (poets) who create worlds, and others who describe worlds.

 —James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966)