| Ezra Pound's poetics and aesthetics in Cathay and Lustra of Ezra Pound convey ideas about China. Although studies often analyze actual contacts between China and America, the changing American ideas about China have yet to receive comprehensive study. This study undertakes to test the assumption that Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915) and Cathay within Lustra (1916) are important to any eventual longer study of China in the American imagination and in the modern literary tradition.; This study employs comparative and analytical methods to illuminate the China that Pound "invented" and the conception of China embodied in his texts. Cathay is placed within a context of other approaches to China. Earlier conceptions of China in European texts are acknowledged including: (1) China as rich commercial market, (2) China as embodiment of Confucian moral and political principles and (3) China as a heathen challenge. American conceptions of China that preceded Cathay are surveyed in conjunction with trade, missionaries to China, Chinese in American and Asian-Americans, the American Transcendentalists, and travellers and scholars in the Orient. Bret Harte's "Plain Language from Truthful James" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Brahma" reveal two poles of approach to the Orient and the Oriental in American poetry before Cathay. Next, the text of Cathay is established and analyzed as translation and as a long poem in English. In the interplay of juxtaposition and the resulting relationships are ideas and approaches to China, as well as the principles of aesthetics encouraged by Ernest Fenollosa and his beliefs about the Chinese character.; This study demonstrates that Cathay presents China as familiar, instead of alien, and as knowable, instead of strange, impenetrable, and mysterious. In Cathay within Lustra readers can experience a global viewpoint that encompasses East and West, thereby countering the view of East and West as separate, opposing entities. The earlier idea of two diametrically opposed traditions is replaced with an idea of complementary relationships. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson's own Asian interests were broadly Asian, rather than primarily Chinese, Ezra Pound emerges as the first major American poet to incorporate such ideas of China into a major cycle of poems and to project them into American culture at large. |
