Transformation and transcendence in modern Chinese and western poetry: Rimbaud, Stevens and Yeh Wei-Lien

In Modernism, the central concern of many poets was the origin of the poet's poetic power and the transformations that power could bring about. These concerns were central for the Romantics. In modern poets, these concerns are developed in different directions. Transformation of the poetic subject and reality implies a re-enacting of the relationship, a bridging of the distance between man, things, and the other. Questions of communion and communication are essential in relation to modern poets' ideas of poetic transformation and transcendence. Thinking through the notion of communication, one may address the problem of modern poetry's thematic preoccupation with loss, death and separation. My thesis reads Rimbaud's and Stevens' poetry in conjunction with Blanchot's and Bataille's notions of poetry. The crucial problem of communication shared by them is one that I also raise through a questioning of Yeh Wei-Lien's Taoist poetics.In the 60's and 70's, faced with modern western poetics, the Chinese scholar-poet Yeh proposed the Taoist aesthetic/poetics as an "alternative" to the "impasse" of modern poetry. "Taoist aesthetic/poetics" is both a term and a poetics coined and formulated by Yeh. His formulation grew out of a comparative study of East-West poetics, particularly of such figures as the T'ang poet Wang Wei XXX (701-761 AD), Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, Mallarme and Wallace Stevens.My comparative study of the poetics of these different modern poets poses the following questions: What is at stake in modern poetry in terms of "the poetic"? How do notions of the "the orphic" and "the alchemy of the word" (essential to the modern French poets) relate to the American poet Stevens and the Chinese Taoist poetics formulated by Yeh? Is the idea of the "real-world" in Yeh's Taoist poetics in any way Taoist? My thesis begins with a discussion of western pastoral elegy, since pastoral elegy offers a historical basis for modern poets concerns with transformation, communication and transcendence. Other than Blanchot and Bataille, thinkers such as Heidegger's and Derrida's notions of poetry will also be discussed in relation to the fundamental issues preoccupying modern poetry.