Influence Of Chinese Cultural Elements On Ezra Pound's Poetry

In the 20 th century American literature, Ezra Pound was a legendary figure and a controversial poet due to his political undertaking. As a representative of imagist poetry, his poetry and poetic principles played an important role in the development of western modern poetry.Ezra pound showed lifelong interest in Oriental culture, especially Chinese culture. His poems were full of Chinese culture elements, images, and even Chinese characters.Chinese characters are an indispensable part of Chinese culture, and their unique ideographic nature has long been appreciated by the western scholars. With his knowledge of Chinese culture, Ezra Pound developed his own insight of Chinese characters. Then he put it into his poetic creation and his poetry took on some Chinese aesthetic features.Chinese classical poetry is another important part of Chinese culture whose unique poetic style attracted and influenced Ezra Pound very much. When translating Chinese classical poems, Pound learned their poetic skills and put them into his imagist poetic creation. Besides, his imagist principles were largely influenced by Chinese image theory. Chinese classical poetry provided Pound with such aesthetic beauties as artistic conception and rhythm as well as conciseness. In The Cantos, Pound created many poems by imitating Chinese landscape poems.Confucianism, as an important part of Chinese culture, played a decisive role in Pound's cultural vision. In The Cantos, through his imagination, Ezra Pound expressed his affirmation and appreciation for Confucian thoughts and set up an ideal image of ancient China in western world. The essence of Confucianism that threads through The Cantos reflects his unyielding admiration for Confucianism.The thesis studies the great influence of such Chinese culture elements as Chinese characters, classical poetry and Confucianism on Pound's poetry.