The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens

What role did Chinese art play in the poetic development of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens? How could they share Chinese artists’ Dao, an aesthetic held to be beyond verbal representation? In this sequel to his critically acclaimed study Orientalism and Modernism, Zhaoming Qian investigates the ways in which these three modernist poets received Chinese artistic notions and assimilated them into their literary masterpieces. With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets’ dialogue with the Chinese masters.

In addition to examining Canto 49, "Nine Nectarines," and "Six Significant Landscapes," by Pound, Moore, and Stevens, respectively, Qian provides indispensable historical and cultural material never before recorded in a single work. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art pays long-overdue attention to the role of several early collections of Chinese art in England and America; it clarifies some common misconceptions about Confucianism and Daoism; it identifies in the modernist poets both linkage to and revolt against their predecessors’—and peers’—hegemonic Orientalism; and it intensifies awareness of modernist Orientalism not as a monolithic and constant conception but as a slippery and shifting process.