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.

First published in 1915, Cathay, Ezra Pound's early monumental work, originally contained fourteen translations from the Chinese and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer." Over time, these poems have been widely read and loved as both translations and original poetry. In 1916, Cathay was reprinted in the book Lustra without "The Seafarer" and with four more Chinese poems. Cathay is greatly indebted to the notes of a Harvard-trained scholar Ernest Fenollosa. "In Fenollosa's Chinese poetry materials," Pound scholar Zhaoming Qian writes, "Pound discovered a new model that at once mirrored and challenged his developing poetics." Edited by Qian, this centennial edition reproduces for the first time the text of the original publication plus the poems from Lustra and transcripts of all the relevant Fenollosa notes and Chinese texts. Also included is a new foreword by Ezra Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, providing an appreciation and fascinating background material on this pivotal work of Pound's oeuvre.

This is the first collection to explore the American poet's career-long relationship with China, considering how Pound's engagement with the Orient broadens the textual, cultural, and political boundaries of his modernism. Leading critics discuss issues of cultural transmission; the influence of Pound's Chinese studies on twentieth-century poetics; the importance of his work to contemporary theory of translation; and the effects of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism on Pound's political and economic thought.
Richly illustrated, the book offers documentary material that is of the utmost importance to any discussion of Pound and China, drawing readers closer to the heart of Pound's vision. Ezra Pound and China will become a necessary addition to the shelves of students and scholars of Pound, cultural studies, translation theory, poetics, Confucianism, and literary transmission and reception.
The book's contributors include Barry Ahearn, Ronald Bush, Wendy Stallard Flory, Christine Froula, Britton Gildersleeve, KIM Jong-gil, Peter Makin, Ira B. Nadel, Zhaoming Qian, Mary de Rachewiltz, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Hong Sun, Emily Mitchell Wallace, and YANG Lian.
Zhaoming Qian is Professor of English, the University of New Orleans.

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.

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.

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.