Ezra Pound's Invention Of China: Poetry, Confucianism And Ideograms

Nobody of the twentieth-century literature has had a more overt relation to China than Ezra Pound(1885-1972). From the early moments of his career to his final days in Italy, Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung in poetry, and renew it. As a young translator, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and developed an aesthetic theory through that poetry. Later on, he interlaced Chinese characters and philosophy with his cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged to him as much as to the Chinese. Till the end of his life such ideas stayed with him. To understand Pound's relation to China is to address one of the knottiest issues in poetic modernism. Cataloging Pound's relation to China has been the work of literary critics, who have produced a vast discourse on the subject of Pound and China for many years. This thesis concentrates on the Chinese culture in Ezra Pound's poetry and offers a detailed reading of Pound's vision of his Confucian belief. His belief is based on his understanding of Confucianism. Pound depicts his paradise as a world that is a harmonious part of nature.Chapter One examines the extent of Chinese poetic influence on Ezra Pound to establish the cultural affinity between Chinese classical poetry and American Imagist poetry more generally. China is a country of poetry. With thousands of years of culture and tradition, a profound aesthetic system came into being--Chinese classical poetics. It has active and far-reaching influence on the development of poetry in the world. Especially from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, through the translation by a few Sinologists and the exchange of scholars between the East and West, Chinese classical poetry went to the West and played a more and more important role in the world.Chapter Two "POUND'S UNIQUE EXPOSITION ON CONFUCIANISM" demonstrates Pound's vision of Confucianism, in his The Cantos, aiming to sort out a developing line of Confucian ideas in the 117 cantos, and to get a conclusion that Confucian ideas form the ethical structure of The Cantos. Chapter Three "THE CHINESE WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND POUND" illustrates Pound's vision for Chinese written characters and the ideogrammic method, his translation of Chinese poetry, and the relationship between this body of translation from Chinese and developing poetics and practices of what is usually referred to as "Imagism". No body than Pound in America had a greater liking for Chinese written language.To sum up, with his penetrating insight into Chinese culture, his translation of Chinese poetry and his investigation into Chinese ideogram, Ezra Pound promoted the exchange between Eastern and Western culture and enhanced the influence of Chinese culture upon American literature.