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 encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. After studying Chinese poetry, Williams published his celebrated set of poems ""The Cassia Tree."" Exposure to the Tao and its doctrines renewed Moore's style. Qian presents a lost lecture by Moore on the subject, transcribed here for the first time. Pound was equally influenced by Confucianism and by, as Qian demonstrates, anthropological studies of the spiritualism and pictographic language of the little-known Naxi people of southwest China. Qian's sinuous readings expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, obsession with imaginative sensibility, and enlarged respect for harmony between humanity and nature.

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 encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. After studying Chinese poetry, Williams published his celebrated set of poems ""The Cassia Tree."" Exposure to the Tao and its doctrines renewed Moore's style. Qian presents a lost lecture by Moore on the subject, transcribed here for the first time. Pound was equally influenced by Confucianism and by, as Qian demonstrates, anthropological studies of the spiritualism and pictographic language of the little-known Naxi people of southwest China. Qian's sinuous readings expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, obsession with imaginative sensibility, and enlarged respect for harmony between humanity and nature.

Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. What is less known but is made fully clear by Zhaoming Qian is the degree to which oriental culture made these poets the modernists they became. This ambitious and illuminating study shows that Orientalism, no less than French symbolism and Italian culture, is a constitutive element of Modernism.
Consulting rare and unpublished materials, Qian traces Pound's and Williams's remarkable dialogues with the great Chinese poets--Qu Yuan, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi--between 1913 and 1923. His investigation reveals that these exchanges contributed more than topical and thematic ideas to the Americans' work and suggests that their progressively modernist style is directly linked to a steadily growing contact and affinity for similar Chinese styles. He demonstrates, for example, how such influences as the ethics of pictorial representation, the style of ellipsis, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Zen-Buddhist notion of nonbeing/being made their way into Pound's pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptations, "Cathay," "Lustra," and the Early Cantos, as well as Williams's "Sour Grapes" and "Spring and All." Developing a new interpretation of important work by Pound and Williams, "Orientalism and Modernism" fills a significant gap in accounts of American Modernism, which can be seen here for the first time in its truly multicultural character.

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.

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.