Three Chinese Poets

Though this trichotomy has been criticised as simplistic and artificial, it can act as a guiding approximation.

It is not clear whether Wang Wei and Li Bai ever met, but they had a mutual friend in Meng Haoran.

In the introduction of Three Chinese Poets, Seth talks about the influence of translations on his life and work; that while sometimes he has been so moved by a translation that he learnt another language to read the original, he doubts that he would ever be able to do this as much as he wished to.

Instead he wanted to follow the example of the translators mentioned above to retain a greater fidelity and to try to preserve structure such as rhyme.

He also makes note that any satisfaction derived from the tonality of the poems is necessarily lost because of the non-tonality of English.