Pound’s Chinese Traditionai Cultural Complex From The Cantos

Ezra Pound, the greatest standard-bearer in the Imagist Movement. He left for posterities a modernistic long epic named The Cantos, which included the contents of literature, art, architecture, mythology, economics, history, etc., and his poetry contents and creative ideas have influenced many poets and scholars from generation to generation. While Pound and his works were extremely controversial for his political speech which concerned fascists during the Second World War, and he had been held in the Pisan Prison and Washington’s mental hospital for 12 years.This paper, from the perspective of the comparative poetics, we regard The Cantos as the study object and discuss the countless relations between Pound and the Chinese traditional culture. Firstly, there are a large number of Chinese traditional culture elements exist in The Cantos, such as Confucianism and the Oriental art. Pound had a great respect for Confucianism, pointedly excluded Christianity, and while actually, to him, Confucianism was just the effective medicine to America, Christianity was the nourishment for his mind. Pound also yearned for an outstanding leader to guide America to a utopia that the morality could instead of legislations to run the country. Secondly, making the acquaintance of Chinese traditional culture is inevitable in Pound’s whole life. He got the posthumous manuscript of Fenollosa under the background of American poetry movement, and got into the palace of Chinese culture let by Binyon and Brzeska, on this road, except the company by Pound’s families and friends, he also acquired the support and encouragement from his publishers constantly for several decades. At last, The Cantos was fulfilled. His compassion to China not only arouse westerners’ interests to Chinese culture and poetics, and promote the breaking out of May Fourth New Poetry Movement in China, but also brought the eastern culture to a higher stage and made the westerns know more about China. The consciousness of de-western centralization is particularly apparent in this process. The communication of two exotic cultures was eventually achieved on the basis of equality.Pound is the messenger to the east and the west, his attitude which treat Chinese and Western cultures as well as poetics equally raised the Chinoserie in American literary field in the 20th century. Chinese culture got the chance to spread to the transoceanic areas, at the same time, Pound had fluctuated the powerful position of western cultures which had existed for hundreds of years. From the perspective of comparative poetics to analyze the text, we could break the center of the Western literary theory indirectly, and introduce our culture and theory with Chinese characteristics, then achieve the good expectations that the multicultural in this world could symbiotic and coexistence harmoniously.