Fir-Flower Tablets

Fir-Flower Tablets is the 1921 volume of classical Chinese poetry brought into English by Florence Wheelock Ayscough (1875-1942), the Shanghai-born sinologue, working with the American poet Amy Lowell. Ayscough supplied scholarly word-for-word renderings and cultural notes; Lowell, who knew no Chinese, shaped them into free verse, and their Li Po and Tu Fu reached American readers at the height of the imagist moment. The collaboration, conducted by mail across years, remains a famous episode in the western discovery of Chinese poetry. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.