SOURCE: Lockwood, William J. “Kenneth Rexroth's Versions of Li Ch'ing-chao.” Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Comparative Studies between Chinese and Foreign Literatures 15, nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 (autumn-summer 1984-85): 389-410.

In the following essay, Lockwood explores the sensual and intellectual kinship between the works of Li Ch'ing-chao and those of poet Kenneth Rexroth, one of the most important translators of her works into English.

In the introduction to his volume of poems titled The Signature of All Things (1949), Rexroth expresses his belief in personality and his preference for poems that can be sung. At age 44, nine years since the publication of his first volume of poems and nine years since the death of his first wife Andree, he contrasts them to those earlier, complex poems he'd written: to heroes and martyrs of social conflict in the language of “Philosophical elegy.” These new poems, unlike those, are as simple, as personal, and as...