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

by Zhaoming Qian

Overview

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 With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets’ dialogue with the Chinese masters.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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813921761
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	03/01/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.75(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	List of Abbreviations	xi
	Preface	xv
Part 1	China in Galleries
1.	Pound and Chinese Art in the "British Museum Era"	3
2.	Chinese Art Arrives in America: Stevens and Moore	22
Part 2	Remaking Culture
3.	Pound and Pictures of Confucian Ideals	47
4.	The Eternal Dao: Pound and Moore	64
5.	Stevens and Chan Art	81
Part 3	Picturing the Other
6.	Stevens's "Six Significant Landscapes"	99
7.	Moore and Ming-Qing Porcelain: "Nine Nectarines"	111
8.	Pound's Seven Lakes Canto	123
Part 4	The Poets as Critics and Connoisseurs
9.	Pound, Fenollosa, and The Chinese Written Character	141
10.	Stevens as Art Collector	155
11.	Moore and The Tao of Painting	167
Part 5	Late Modernism and the Orient
12.	Moore and O to Be a Dragon	181
13.	Nothingness and Late Stevens	193
14.	The Chinese in Rock-Drill and Thrones	207
Appendix	Moore's Typescript for "Tedium and Integrity"	225
	Notes	229
	Index	263

Editorial Reviews

[Qian's goal] to establish the plural grounds of influence..is impressively achieved through ample and meticulously researched biographical details, accounts of gallery and museum exhibitions in America and England, and summaries of Chinese spiritual and aesthetic traditions.. Impediments to interart studies seem to be lifting finally where poetry is concerned, and Zhaoming Qian's book is a strong contribution in this direction..

—The Wallace Stevens Journal

[A] richly illustrated and convincingly argued book.. Qian has opened wide the gates of understanding and appreciation to a subject few had the linguistic and cultural background to explain. Highly recommended.

—CHOICE

Qian's book is both impressively erudite and highly readable, sustained by lucid writing, insightful perceptions, and cogent arguments. By exploring a hitherto overlooked subject, his inquiry makes significant contributions to several fields, including modernist poetry, comparative literature, and transnational cultural production. More intriguingly, it also raises issues impelling us to reconceptualize the enterprise of orientalism.

—Twentieth Century Literature

From the Publisher

[Qian's goal] to establish the plural grounds of influence..is impressively achieved through ample and meticulously researched biographical details, accounts of gallery and museum exhibitions in America and England, and summaries of Chinese spiritual and aesthetic traditions.. Impediments to interart studies seem to be lifting finally where poetry is concerned, and Zhaoming Qian's book is a strong contribution in this direction..

The Wallace Stevens Journal

[A] richly illustrated and convincingly argued book.. Qian has opened wide the gates of understanding and appreciation to a subject few had the linguistic and cultural background to explain. Highly recommended.

CHOICE

Qian's book is both impressively erudite and highly readable, sustained by lucid writing, insightful perceptions, and cogent arguments. By exploring a hitherto overlooked subject, his inquiry makes significant contributions to several fields, including modernist poetry, comparative literature, and transnational cultural production. More intriguingly, it also raises issues impelling us to reconceptualize the enterprise of orientalism.

Twentieth Century Literature

[A] richly illustrated and convincingly argued book.. Qian has opened wide the gates of understanding and appreciation to a subject few had the linguistic and cultural background to explain. Highly recommended.

Choice