The Selected Poems of Wang Wei by Wang Wei
Published 761 · 22,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is The Selected Poems of Wang Wei to read?
The Selected Poems of Wang Wei scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- A deliberately small vocabulary of natural objects, with Buddhist terms and Wang River place names carrying most of the specialised weight.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Regulated quatrains with no grammatical subject, so who is seeing and when is left grammatically open, a gap every translation has to negotiate.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- A Chan Buddhist account of perception and emptiness delivered entirely through moss, light and water.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Twenty characters per poem, but each carries allusion to Buddhist sutras and to the estate's topography.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- There is often no speaker at all; the poems record a scene without establishing who observes it or why.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- Empty mountain, returning light, unseen blossom and the closed gate are a consistent figurative system for absence and non-attachment.
- Ironic distance: 32 out of 100
- Wang Wei means what he shows; the poems contain no gap between surface and intention.
- Resolution withholding: 74 out of 100
- Nothing concludes. The poems stop on an image and refuse the summarising final line that Tang verse usually supplies.
- Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
- Short lyrics, though the Wang River sequence of twenty quatrains is designed to be read as one circuit of an estate.
How The Selected Poems of Wang Wei is regarded
The Selected Poems of Wang Wei holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.