A Comparative Study Between William Wordsworth And Wang Wei

As a common medium to convey human emotions universally, poetry is like a mirror that reflects the most sincere feelings of human hearts. William Wordsworth and Wang Wei, two great nature poets famous for their landscape and pastoral poems, provide us with a good example for a comparative study on English and Chinese poetry.William Wordsworth, an outstanding poet of the Lake District in the nineteenth-century England, claimed himself as a worshipper of nature and ushered the beginning of English Romanticism; while Wang Wei, a renowned poet living in the Tang Dynasty of the eighth-century China, influenced later Chinese landscape poems by his fresh and natural style. Many similarities exist between them. First, they were both religious believers. Besides, they shared some similarities on their lives: they all experienced the social turbulence and both chose to live in close contact with nature later. Finally, from the perspective of ecocriticism, both of them could be regarded as pre-ecological poets and many of their poems reflect their ecological consciousness. As regard to the language features, both chose some similar poetic images; yet in the features of syntax and vision in their poems, many discrepancies emerged, which could be explained by the different traits of two languages as well as their different thinking patterns.Much individual study has been made on the two poets, yet not much achievement has been made in the sphere of a comparative study. This dissertation of five parts aims at making a comparative exploration on them:Introduction briefly introduces Wordsworth and Wang Wei, and then provides a literary review of the two poets. Chapter One compares their social and personal background. Wordsworth was influenced by Christianity and Pantheism while Wang Wei was a devout believer of Chan Buddhism. Yet very interestingly both of them led an eventful life and experienced the social turbulence under their specific historical background. Chapter Two mainly aims at presenting the ecological consciousness found in their poems. In Wordsworth’s nature poems, nature has the soothing effect to the mind, and everything has its soul and is integrated into this organic world. In Wang Wei’s landscape poems, everything lives in accordance with its attribute and in harmony with nature, without any interference from human beings. The correlation of their outlook on nature is the spirit of ecological holism. Chapter Three analyzes the different language features and the reasons of this discrepancy. The discrepancies on the syntax and the adoption of different perspectives construct the different representation of poetic meanings. Many of Wordsworth’s poems contain the "self" and the "mind" while those of Wang Wei’s are featured by an "impersonal state". Conclusion is a summary of this dissertation.