Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

doi:10.1017/9781108614719.009

Chapter 8 - Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

From the War Zone to the Green World

from Part II - Ezra Pound and Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2019

Akitoshi Nagahata

Edited by

Mark Byron

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Mark Byron: Affiliation:
University of Sydney

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Summary

In his London years, Pound had ambivalent feelings about the marginal status of the country of his origin, the United States. On the one hand, he had a strong desire to position himself in the centre of Western civilization; on the other hand, he could not help being conscious of his origin in the margin – the frontier – of that civilization. For example, at the beginning of ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman,’ published in 1909, he wrote, ‘From this side of Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and … my world citizenship’ (SP 145), but in his poem ‘A Pact’, published in 1916, he addressed to his imaginary Whitman, ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us’ (PT 269).

Keywords

Sinocentrism borderland Chinese frontiers barbarians Mongols Tartars frontier exoticism Manchu Naxi

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Ezra Pound Studies , pp. 127 - 140

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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