Looks at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. This book gathers some 200 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry to the great masters of the T'ang and Sung dynasties. It also includes translations by Pound, a selection of essays by five translators and biographical notes that are a collage of poems.
Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese (1955) proved such an extremely popular book that he put together a sequel. The poems are representative of a large range of classical, medieval, and modern poetry, but the emphasis, as in him companion Chinese collections (1955 and 1970), is on folk songs and love lyrics.