This volume offers new interpretations of Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound’s work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of the century through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on to translations of The Cantos spanning the last fifty years.
This volume offers new interpretations of Pound's poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound's work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of the century through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on to translations of The Cantos spanning the last fifty years.
Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.
In Ezra Pound and Confucianism, Feng Lan offers the first study of Ezra Pound's project of establishing a Confucian humanism as an alternative to Western modernism. While Pound scholars are familiar with the American poet's commitment to Confucianism, the question of how Confucianism systematically shaped Pound's thoughts has not been convincingly answered. Lan shows that when confronted with what appeared to him a dehumanising modern world, Pound discovered in Confucianism possible solutions to issues that he encountered in language, politics, and religion, which Western intellectual tradition as a whole had failed to provide. By integrating Confucian doctrines with received ideas from Western tradition, Pound developed a humanist discourse and brought it to bear on the historical conditions of his time. The result was a discourse characterized primarily by the following beliefs: the human mind as the source of creation, the individual's moral will as the basis of truth and social order, the human partnership with the world of nature, the self-perfectibility of human beings, and their innate capability for internal transcendence in spiritual life. Lan examines the strategies with which Pound reconstructed Confucianism into a systematic modern discourse, focusing on his controversial translation of Confucian scriptures, his rethinking of the nature of language and poetry, his political theory of the individual and the state, and his formulation of an unorthodox spirituality. Situating Pound's works in diverse cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts, Ezra Pound and Confucianism demonstrates that, despite its frequent divergence from the Confucian canon, Pound's Confucian humanism gives his poetry an ideological coherence, enriches the Western humanist tradition, and asserts its relevance to the historical and cross-cultural development of Confucianism in modern times.
In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these cross-cultural encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. Qian’s sinuous readings of the three modernists’ last books of verse—Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel (1962), Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Pound’s Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1969)—expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, its obsession with imaginative sensibility, and its increased respect for harmony between humanity and nature.
"Both a commentary on and a critical appreciation of the work of the early Pound. It starts off with a luci introduction to Pound's technique in general, and to his imagist phase (during which the poems commented on in this book were written) in particular. In the critical passages Mr. Ruthven steers a sage middle course between the attitudes of uncritical adoration and wholesale rejection that mar so much of the literature on Pound. . . . informative without being pedantic, and exhaustive without being long-winded. . . .To turn to Mr. Ruthven's Guide is to follow in the footsteps of an intelligent, sensitive and reliable scholar." --English Studies This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
Cathay is a compilation of traditional Chinese poems translated into English by poet Ezra Pound. These fifteen poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right.
Collecting in full for the first time the correspondence between Ezra Pound and members of Leo Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt across a 30 year period, this book sheds new light on an important but previously unexplored influence on Pound's controversial intellectual development in the Fascist era. Ezra Pound's long-term interest in anthropology and ethnography exerted a profound influence on early 20th century literary Modernism. These letters reveal the extent of the influence of Frobenius' concept of 'Paideuma' on Pound's poetic and political writings during this period and his growing engagement with the culture of Nazi Germany. Annotated throughout, the letters are supported by contextualising essays by leading Modernist scholars as well as relevant contemporary published articles by Pound himself and his leading correspondent at the Institute, the American Douglas C. Fox.
The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.
