The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, StevensWhat 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 With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets' dialogue with the Chinese masters.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. Zhaoming Qian, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams and the editor of Ezra Pound and China. |
Contents
Preface | xv |
China in Galleries | 1 |
Pound and Chinese Art in the British Museum Era | 3 |
Chinese Art Arrives in America Stevens and Moore | 22 |
Remaking Culture | 45 |
Pound and Pictures of Confucian Ideals | 47 |
The Eternal Dao Pound and Moore | 64 |
Stevens and Chan Art | 81 |
Pounds Seven Lakes Canto | 123 |
The Poets as Critics and Connoisseurs | 139 |
Pound Fenollosa and The Chinese Written Character | 141 |
Stevens as Art Collector | 155 |
Moore and The Tao of Painting | 167 |
Late Modernism and the Orient | 179 |
Moore and O to Be a Dragon | 181 |
Nothingness and Late Stevens | 193 |
Picturing the Other | 97 |
Stevenss Six Significant Landscapes | 99 |
Moore and MingQing Porcelain Nine Nectarines | 111 |
The Chinese in RockDrill and Thrones | 207 |
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The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens Zhaoming Qian No preview available - 2003 |