Graham on the Poetic Sensibility

A. C. Graham's introduction to his Poems of the Late T'ang  (1965; NYRB Reprint) is one of the most scintillating short essays that I've read since I don't know when (though I admit, on a topic about which I know almost nothing).  Here's a teaser:

Although closer inspection might reveal a more gradual process, one has the impression that Japanese poetry begins to concentrate multiple meanings during the ninth century, English in the late sixteenth; French as recently as the nineteenth; in China it is plausible to trace the beginnings of the development to the poems which Tu Fu wrote after his arrival in K'uei-chou in 766. 

Doesn't get much better than that, does it?