Research Guide to American Literature

creating a poetic of somber spiritual devotion—a devotion on full display in his
first book, Rose.
Lee’s first book is a small but attentively crafted collection of which he once
said, “Now that I look at it and it’s so thin I wish I would have put more in. But
I just couldn’t. I am such a slow writer. I think for somebody who writes this
way the danger is writing anecdotes” (Ingersoll). Many critics have discussed the
subject matter of Lee’s work, but too few have acknowledged Lee’s meticulous
technique. The poems in Rose were not written in haste, nor mindlessly selected
for their inclusion in the collection. It stands a book constructed with care and
constructed of poems composed and revised with patience.
Lee’s impact on contemporary American literature is significant—particu-
larly his perspective as an Asian man who immigrated to the United States as
a child. Xiaojing Zhou claims, “Lee’s poems and poetics are largely shaped by
his experience as a refugee and immigrant and by his readings in English, being
educated from grade school through college in the United States.” Lee’s poetry
represents a multicultural perspective on the American experience and is compel-
ling because it blurs cultural stereotypes. Taken together, the poems in Rose reflect
on both Asian and American ideals as well as on feelings of cultural aimlessness.
Lee alludes to this aimlessness in his memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
(1995), when recounting a story about his arrival in the United States as a child.
He writes, “And by the time we got to America, my feet were tired. My father put
down our suitcase, untied my shoes, and rubbed my feet, one at a time and with
deep turns of the wrist I heard the water in him through my soles. Since then I
have listened for him in my steps.” Lee describes a life of constant travel that ends
with rest in the United States—rest symbolized by both settlement in America
and peace within his family.
Three major themes transcend Rose: the conflicts of simultaneously occupy-
ing multiple cultural communities, the importance of family, and the grief of loss.
Throughout the text Lee intertwines these three themes so that they all become
synonymous with one another. Often flowers, plants, and other natural objects
represent these themes. These characteristics are on display best in Lee’s most
anthologized poem, “Persimmons,” which is exemplary of Rose as an entire collec-
tion. In the poem the persimmons become symbols for his aging parents, Chinese
heritage, and difficulty finding acceptance in the United States.
The importance of natural images—particularly flowers—as representations
of Lee’s major themes continues in “The Weight of Sweetness” and “From Blos-
soms,” in which peaches and peach blossoms signify hope for a speaker haunted
by death. In “Falling: The Code,” “My Indigo,” “Irises,” “Eating Alone,” “Visions
and Interpretations,” and the poem sequence “Always a Rose,” fruit and flow-
ers represent life’s mutability. Like Modernist poets Walt Whitman, H.D., and
Marianne Moore, as well as like the highly influential poet Elizabeth Bishop,
Lee finds meaning in the natural world. For him, a persimmon or a rose is not
a mere clipping of vegetation but a mirror in which he sees himself and those
he loves. In “Always a Rose” Lee writes, “if I adore you, Rose, / with adoration
become nonsense become / praise, could I stop our dying?” Of course, the speaker
is asking a rhetorical question, but what we see in such a question is Lee’s hope

Li-Young Lee 2