Intertextual Interpretation Of Pound's "Poetry"

Ezra Pound,a great but controversial poet in the 20th century,is noted as one of the most difficult writers in the British and American literary world.The Cantos,a masterpiece that Pound spent more than 52 years composing yet still not finishing till his death,is universally acknowledged as "a sophisticated book".Besides readers'frustrated experience of running into more than twenty languages,the epic has other notorious difficulties to draw close,i.e.,the fragmentary typography,the rambling text composition,the stream-of-conscious expression as well as the mysterious ideology,etc.All these above,on the one hand,make The Cantos hard to articulate among people,and on the other hand,will bring puzzles and challenges to poetry critics of western world and China.Most important of all,as for the reading and interpretation of The Cantos,many specific discourses cannot be linked organically,and an appropriate perspective seems hard to find to probe into them instantly,which results in readers'stalemate or dilemma in comprehension and cognition.Luckily,the theory of intertextuality,proposed by French theoretician Julia Kristeva,provides a unique insight,not only helping readers to change their way of thinking but also offering the possibility to crack the hard nut.An Intertextual Perspective of Ezra Pound's The Cantos is such a work to attempt to invite le retour de l'inspecteur Harry.Speaking of the overseas academic achievements regarding Pound and The Cantos,European and American scholars primarily focus on five categories.Firstly,they have compiled a variety of Pound's writings and have had the corresponding works published,which paves the foundation for readers to study;secondly,they have careful case studies about Pound's life and career,social encounterings,academic ups and downs,etc;thirdly,they make documentary introductions and guidelines towards Pound's poetry or his translated works;fourthly,they mean to explore and examine the artistic features and themes of Pound's works;and fifthly,they carry on the discussions about Pound's academic identity,cultural impact,historical role,etc in western literary circles.Chinese scholars also have enthusiastic studies about Pound and The Cantos,among which five categories are extremely impressive.Firstly,they show great interest in Pound's translation thoughts and theories;secondly,they employ comparative approaches to look into the inside and outside affiliations between Pound and Chinese traditional cultures;thirdly,they refer to literary theories to make targeted studies about Pound's writing innovations and poetic speculations;fourthly,they concentrate on Pound's poetic styles,subjects,artistic characteristics,or conduct specific studies about Pound's works like "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley","The Pisan Cantos",etc;and fifthly,they adopt aesthetic persepctives to examine Pound's translated works like Cathay,A Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius,etc.Through the literature reviews above,the writer realizes that up to now,there have been no scholars at home and abroad to employ purposely the theory of intertextuality to undertake a systematic text study of Pound's The Cantos.Although Lawrence S.Rainey's A Poem Containing History:Textual Studies in The Cantos(1997),Richard Taylor's "The Texts of The Cantos"(1999)and Jennifer Marie Nurmi's Epistemology and Intertextual Practice in Ezra Pound's The Cantos(2007)have involved certain narrations about text or intertextuality,the obvious imperfections also get exposed between the lines of their works.Meanwhile,Chinese scholars mainly do research about Pound's translation theories and practice,but still have a long way to go in the case of evaluating comprehensively Pound's poetic achievements.Particularly,Pound's The Cantos requires the down-to-earth exploration and concrete studies in text analysis.What's more,Chinese doctoral students and graduates have not taken any clear-cut stand currently to resort to intertextual studies towards Pound's The Cantos,let alone approaching the work with overall assessment and systematic studies.On account of the fact,this dissertation attempts to employ the intertextual theories to have a careful discussion of the textuality of Pound's The Cantos,which aims to make up the deficiency of the studies of the scholars both at home and abroad.This dissertation is mainly composed of five chapters apart from Introduction and Conclusion.Chapter One holds that The Cantos can be viewed as a poetic and artistic text.This text refers to Pound's poetic language and form,and artistically represents his sophisticated reflections besides what Pound had experienced in his lifetime,thus revealing a particular poetic function,i.e.,"clarifying ideas through poetry while practicing inspirations through singing." Intertextually,The Cantos is a collection with numerous "sounds",in which not only the poetic images cast light on each other,but also the vortex made of images responds with echoes and lingering sounds.In addition,The Cantos is imbedded with discourses of Homer,Dante,Whiteman,Browning,Yeats,Eliot,H.D.,etc,turning out to be a lyrical dramatic epic with the noted stars and their voices playing on.In essence,The Cantos has had parodies upon the orthodox ideological systems and the narrative ways of Odyssey and The Divine Comedy,simultaneously integrated with the style of Walt Whitman's free verse,Robert Browning's dramatic monologue,William B.Yeats's symbolism as well as T.S.Eliot's and H.D.'s experimental writings.All these contribute to Pound's unique artistic experiences and eccentric poetic qualities.Chapter Two holds that The Cantos can be viewed as an anthropological and cultural text.This text tends to prove that The Cantos is not the parochial statement and utterance that advocate the supremacy of American culture.But on the contrary,Pound considers that American culture is filled with troubles,hence confined in "a dark forest".American people need to acquire the critical spirit from ancient Greek and Roman cultures while absorbing the inclusive spirit from oriental cultures so as to rescue their national culture from danger and then "walk into light".This also insinuates the fact that human cultural texts will influence each other and may have composite dialogues.Intertextually,Pound refers to various textual forms in The Cantos and demonstrates colorful human cultures in details:on the one hand,The Cantos has a definite objective in displaying the dialogue and carnival between the cultures,and on the other hand,it presents incisively Pound's true cultural appeals.Chapter Three holds that The Cantos can be viewed as a social and historical text.This text fulfills both the social and historical functions like keeping a record of human events,giving people precautions,etc.As a unique textual being here,The Cantos not only absorbed and transformed the historical works of the past,but also resorted to the ways of parody,collage,quotation,imitation,etc.to reconstruct and remould the contemporary social and historical texts.Pound's poetry is meant to integrate the historical factors of all ages,and displays that these historical factors will have active effects upon human society.As a result,in The Cantos,many instances can be observed that the historical events have been transformed into the historical texts,the historical texts have been transformed into the social and public consciousness while the social and public consciousnesses have been in turn transformed into literature.Chapter Four holds that The Cantos can be viewed as a political and economic text.This text is the very being in which Pound has exposed his immature political and economic ideas,thus taken as a triggering reason why The Cantos arouses so much controversy among readers since its publication.Pound originally obtained political influences from his forebears,and then became a devout believer in Orage Rudge and C.H.Douglas's political ideas and economic thoughts,hoping that he could work out a reference for American national revival.At the same time,Pound impossibly anchored hopes on his Fascist "bosses" like Mussolini,assuming that the "bull" could help him change ideological ideas into practice,yet he became the one who played the fire and got burned.Transparently,Pound is "a political fool".Besides,Pound makes his voices of anti-semitism heard in The Cantos" which are labeled as "a dictator's crime" that "set forth from the depth of his heart".Though Pound has delivered confessions towards Jewish people,he obviously lacks sincerity to have them practiced.Pound's political and economic thoughts are filled with scars,but it does not mean that all his thoughts are insignificant.For instance,some of his political and economic thoughts are the results of Chinese ancient sages' political and economic teachings,which are essentially meaningful.Chapter Five holds that The Cantos can be viewed as a moral and philosophical text.This text claims that The Cantos serves as a shining vehicle of Pound's moral and philosophical proclamations,dotted with illuminous details and Pound's persistent inquiries and reflections of justice,light and humanity as well as truth,goodness and beauty.Hence the text is a representation of Pound's moral consciousness and philosophical beliefs.Making a detailed survey of The Cantos,the writer observes that the work not only includes Pound's personal insights into life,morality and philosophical phenomena,but also concerns ancient Greek and Roman philosophy,British and French philosophy of Enlightenment,German rationalistic philosophy,American Transcendentalism,and Chinese Confucious philosophy.All these have wonderfully mirrored Pound's acquisitions of western philosophies,and also demonstrated his unique thinking and acceptions of the oriental morality and philosophy.Fundamentally,Pound's absorption and digestion of Chinese philosophical ideas about the Golden Mean(Chung),Benevolence,Tao,etc make him voluntarily establish an intertextual communication with pragmatic philosophy,aiming to balance the relationship between nation and people.In the meantime,his interpretation and proclamation of the philosophical concepts about right and wrong,beauty and ugliness,good and evil,etc make him achieve new knowledge of the social and moral principles.Besides,in The Cantos,we recognize that Pound is both an enthusiastic adorer of neo-Platonic ideas and a spokesman of the Populist morality and philosophy.Pound stands firmly in common people's position to safeguard the social justice,announcing that it is "not a right but a duty" and hoping that his words towards the benifits of people will "stand uncancelled".Transparently,theory of intertextuality serves as a vehicle to view The Cantos.And through examining The Cantos with the very participation of intertextual principles,readers may work out that The Cantos,as a particular text,maintains the features of openness,ambiguity and trans-context.Of course,looking back to survey the theory of intertextuality itself through analyzing The Cantos,readers may also find unexpectedly that the intertextual interpretation of The Cantos is,to some extent,a contribution to the development of intertextual theories,or frankly speaking,an expansion and renewal.To sum up,it is of great sginificance to point out that Pound's The Cantos is a grand encyclopedic work with boundless charm while this dissertation is merely an experiment to refer to intertextual theories to examine the known textual contents.Thus the study is essentially a peep through a tube at a leopard and cannot cover all the bases.Although the recognized theories of text and intertextuality are employed to evaluate The Cantos as a poetic and artistic text,an anthropological and cultural text,a social and historical text,a political and economic text as well as a moral and philosophical text,the relevant studies cannot concern all phonomena existing in the work because Pound's The Cantos is an aggregation of numorous signifiers and discourses,inundated with endless possibilities.The job to read and interprete The Cantos is obviously a beginning,as an academic fact goes "from the signifiers of a poem,we can educe more signifiers;and from the discourses of a poem,we can read countless other discourses".Maybe because of this,the studies about Pound's The Cantos are a bit hard and time-consuming;and maybe because of this,the dissertation concerning the textual analysis of The Cantos proves itself unique and meaningful.