Works
He was famous for both his poetry and his paintings, about which Su Shi coined a phrase: "The quality of Wang Wei’s poems can be summed as, the poems hold a painting within them. In observing his paintings you can see that, within the painting there is poetry." He is especially known for his compositions in the Mountains and Streams (山水诗) genre, the landscape school of poetry, along with Meng Haoran; their family names were combined and they are commonly referred to as "Wang Meng" due to their excellence in poetic composition at that time. In his later years Wang Wei lost interest in being a statesman and became more involved in Buddhism and his poems reflected his focus on Zen/Ch'an practice, therefore he was posthumously referred to as the “Poet Buddha”. His works are collected in Secretary General Wang's Anthology, which includes 400 poems. He excelled in painting images of people, bamboo forests and scenery of mountains and rivers. It is recorded that his landscape paintings have two different genres, one of the Father and Son of the Li Family (李氏父子) and the other being of strong brush strokes; his work of Picture of Wang River is of the latter, but unfortunately the original no longer exists. His works of Scenery of Snow and Creek and Jinan’s Fusheng Portrait are both realistic in their representation of the subjects.
Read more about this topic: Wang Wei (8th Century Poet)
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)