"I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality"
About this Quote
“I wonder what…sound like in Chinese” puts the ear first. That’s a songwriter’s tell. It’s about cadence, consonants, breath, the way meaning rides on tone and rhythm before it ever becomes “content.” In English, classical Chinese poetry often arrives as a kind of minimal, clarified essence: images floating in white space, emotion implied rather than stated. Verlaine’s phrase “distilled quality” is an artist’s compliment with a skeptic’s edge. Distillation is refinement, but it’s also processing. Something has been cooked down, filtered, maybe altered to suit the container.
The subtext is a quiet challenge to the Anglophone fantasy of “pure” Eastern brevity. What we admire as spare might be partly the translator’s knife, partly our own hunger for a cleaner, less cluttered language than the one we live in. Verlaine, coming out of the New York art-rock ecosystem, understood that style is never innocent: it’s a set of choices about what to omit, what to leave jagged, what to let listeners supply.
He’s also confessing a bias toward compression: the poem as a tight coil rather than a lecture. That’s not just a literary preference; it’s a musical one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Verlaine, Tom. (2026, January 16). I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wonder-what-all-those-chinese-poets-sound-like-91342/
Chicago Style
Verlaine, Tom. "I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wonder-what-all-those-chinese-poets-sound-like-91342/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wonder-what-all-those-chinese-poets-sound-like-91342/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2026.





