Preface

Summary

Beginning with a wide-angle lens, in an effort to accommodate so broad a subject as Western fascination with Chinese since the Renaissance, this book ultimately narrows its focus to consider the effects of that fascination on language and style in the work of some twentieth-century American poets. Primarily, I am interested in writers who are drawn to Chinese – or to a mythologized and idealized conception of it – as an embodiment of the equally mythic (and Western) idea of the language of nature, and who thus see in Chinese a model for a purified poetic practice in English, a practice consonant, as I see it, with the aims of poetic modernism generally. One could argue, of course, that such a practice properly originates with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915) or, a decade or so earlier, with Ernest Fenollosa's essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Yet the impulses that drove Fenollosa and then Pound to Chinese, it seems clear, have deeper roots, not only in American literary history (particularly the work of Emerson) but in intellectual and linguistic traditions that go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and it is to this prehistory, with its ramifications in the fields of poetics, translation, and cultural exchange, that I also wish to draw attention.