The Landscape Of Nothingness

Wang Wei, a leading poet in Chinese Tang dynasty, has long been renowned for his landscape poetry of ethereal tranquility wherein lucid images resound with immense emptiness. Wallace Stevens is a preeminent20th century American poet, whose poetry, with its brilliant language, singular images and philosophical profundity, have won wide popularity among critics as well as ordinary readers. The present work demonstrates how two poets establish their poetics through the interplay of being and nothingness. The first chapter discusses the relation of being and nothingness in the context of western and eastern philosophy, with the focus on the different ontological statuses that are granted to nothingness in two philosophical traditions. In an attempt to uncover the ground in which their poetics take root, the second chapter investigates Wand Wei and Steven’s philosophical orientation, through the exploration of their concept of truth and self. It will be argued that while Wang Wei deconstructs ultimate truth by equating emptiness with being, and embraces the non-self as true self, Stevens conceives of nothingness as the starting point, from which he sets out to explore the possibility of ultimate truth where his multiple self as true self can dwell. The third chapter examines the aesthetic strategy that the two poets employ in their poetic creation. In part1, much attention is given to Wang’s ethereal realm(空灵之境) and Stevens’abstraction, by which their poetry moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite to the infinite. The part2of this chapter presents Wang’s "capture images with focused mind"(凝情取象) and Steven’s imagination as two different metal states as well as two different poetic techniques. It will be pointed out that while Wang describes things exactly as they are, with no effort to fabricate any poetic scenes, or to interfere with external objects by intellectual activities, Stevens, driven by cognitive desire, invents a dazzling range of images as the fusion of imagination and reality, so as to enhance, intensify and reshape the barren world.What is distinctive about my study is three-fold: First, this dissertation is the first study that concerns itself with the comparative analysis of Wang Wei and Stevens’ poetry. No such research has been conducted in China and broad. Second, I choose the interplay of being and nothingness as the central theme to connect Wang Wei and Stevens at a broad and deep level. It serves as a thread to weave their concepts of truth and self, and their aesthetic strategies, namely, ethereal realm, abstraction, focused mind and imagination, into an organic whole, where, on the one hand, we can compare two poets point by point, and see clearly the similarities and differences between them, and, on the other hand, we can gain a profound insight into the fundamental nature of poetic sensibility in general in relation to both artistic value and existential significance. Furthermore, the mutual illumination of two poets enables us to find out what underlies their poetic structure, that is, the mechanism by which their mind operate in poetic creation. Another distinguishing feature of my study is that it is committed to the holistic approach in the context of western-eastern philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. This interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue provides a panoramic view for me to identify what are the possible sources of Wang and Stevens’ philosophic-poetic thoughts, and to what extent, their poetic patterns are influenced by cultural traditions.