The Study Of The Influence Of Classical Chinese Poetry And Cultural Ethos On American Poet James Wright’s Poetry

James Arlington Wright, praised as a great nature poet, is referred as one of the most eminent lyrical poet in the history of the20th American poetry. After Pound’s generation, James Wright also established himself as a superb p oet by way of absorbing great classical Chinese poetry. With the mixture of Whitmaneque free verse and unique emotional experience and aesthetic sensibil ity of Chinese poets, he initiated in poetry creation his own idiosyncrasy whi ch ushered in the wisdom of Chinese monism to the contemporary American poetry and explored new possibilities for its development.On the basis of analysis of his initial poetic characteristics, the poetic duali ty and his holistic cognition of Chinese classics and poetry, this dissertation ai ms to illustrate how James Wright changes the trite ideas about "image" in W estern poetic tradition under the influence of the perception and modality of i magery in Chinese poetry. The author will demonstrate the immanent correlatio n between his theory of "deep image" and new conception of "Poetry is a pas sageway" and make out the words "deep image" should be the equivalence of Chinese imagery, and the author will confute the general idea home and abro ad James Wright is a heir to Imagist Poetry. The author will also elucidate ho w James Wright echoes Chinese poets’emotional experience as embodied in th eir poetry,and introduces the conceptions of fusion of emotions and scenes, em otional expression by way of describing scenes to his poetry writing. To some extent, such an echoing rectifies the tendency in contemporary American poet ry of dehumanization and highly formalized individualist presentation caused b y modernist and New Critical formalist theories.Through the close reading of his poems,the author will focus on the analy sis of how James Wright employs the skills borrowed from Chinese poetry of imposition and leaping of images, understatement and the breaking of the bou ndaiy of time and space and on expounding how he successfully fulfills the C hinese aesthetic sensibility in the personal state of mind and develops his own spatial sense of the balance of Yin and Yang by using Chinese scatter perspe ctives in observing and perceiving the world around. The author will also be bent on illustrating the way James Wright fuses Whitmaneque free verse with Chinese aesthetic modality of perception of the world in the impersonal state o f mind and on clarifying the way he realizes " Metempsychosis " in the psych ological unconsciousness of emotional experience. Hence some prominent poeti c cases of intuitively experiencing the external world. The author will further r efute the popular idea home and abroad James Wright is a neo-surrealism.In reference to his understanding and interpretation of Chinese cultural etho s, the author will make clear the intertextuality between James Wright’s poems and Chinese texts as to further illustrate how he transplanted Confucian ecolo gical ethics in his nature poems. With regards to his great achievements, his p oems provide contemporary American literature with outstanding cases for the ecological criticism and studies. And then the author will point out that James Wright assimilates Mencius’ political ideas about "Wang" and hegemony" in h is political pomes, which are excellent examples of reflecting and condemning American government’s policies. The author will elaborate on James Wright’s i mplied political ideal for solitude, his attitudes of "transcendental bliss","non-i nterferenCe","equality of objects" and Zen illumination toward life, all of wh ich are shaped under the influence of Taoism and Buddhism as to clarify how he fuses American Transcendentalism with Chinese oneness in response to su ch ultimate questions as life and death, the way to man’s utmost freedom and make clear his cosmological belief of "entrust his life to mountains" toward death. In this sense, James Wright virtually transcendences the Western ontolo gical duality and gets access to the realm of mind in which his personal life merges into the universe and he realizes the artistic dream for the integration of poetic, internal and external worlds. Consequently, his poems partly clear a way the permeant pessimism in American poetry creation and bring new imagi nation and optimism for its possibilities.