The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (review)

With the publication of Zhaoming Qian's acclaimed Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Duke University Press, 1995), few critics and literary historians would now doubt the crucial role Chinese poetry played in shaping Pound's and Williams's transition toward modernism in particular, and in shaping Anglo-European high modernism in general. By moving China to center stage in modernist studies with that pioneering study, Qian contributed significantly to our understanding of modernism as a multicultural phenomenon. The same author has now published another acclaimed book The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, and Stevens, which explores the three modernist poets' creative response to and appropriation of Chinese visual art in their poetry. Given the book's intended readership of "scholars and students devoted to poetic modernism" (xix), who are likely unfamiliar with Chinese art, one immediately notes three formidable challenges for Qian that are presented by the book's subject: 1) providing expertise in modern American poetry and Chinese art and culture, 2) describing the exchange between the verbal and the visual, 3) making visible the exchange between American poetry and Chinese art.

To Qian's credit, he meets these challenges superbly by making the book accessible even to readers without much knowledge of modern American poetry and Chinese art. Appropriately, he begins by addressing the question: how did the three American poets come to engage with Chinese art and culture? He details, with precision and erudition, their visits to such places as the British Museum (Pound and Moore), the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Stevens), and their reading of such cultural transmitters as Lawrence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles (Pound), Arthur Waley and Witter Bynner (Moore). Qian provides a clear chronology of the three poets' early encounters with Chinese art and culture, and these encounters are set against the larger context of a Western zeal for Chinese art and culture. But why were the three American poets so attracted to exotic Chinese paintings? What was it in the pictures they saw that captivated their eyes? This is the second question Qian addresses in the first two parts of the book. Qian shows that the three poets were fascinated by the Confucian and Daoist ideals in the pictures they viewed. He explains, vividly and lucidly, how the pictures Lady Feng and the Bear (48) and Lady Ban Refuses to Ride (50) illustrate the Confucian ideas of loyalty to the lord and social decorum, and how the pictures Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar (66) and Wangchuan Villa (67) display the Daoist notions of nature, ambiguity, and harmony. As Qian shows, Pound and Moore responded enthusiastically to both Confucian and Daoist ideals and made use of them in their poems (this is evident especially in Moore's "Nine Nectarines" and Pound's Seven Lakes Canto, but also in poems discussed elsewhere [12, 13, 56, 64]) just as Stevens responded favorably to Chan Buddhism, which is a "harmonized synthesis" (79) of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism (as evidenced by Stevens's "Six Significant Landscapes" and other poems [86, 90]). Indeed, in embracing Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan Buddhism, the three American poets have grasped something that is particularly Chinese—the appreciation of balance, or reconciliation of opposites. Here Pound stands out as a striking example of such reconciliation: he not only admires the mimetic power of Chinese written characters, the picture writing, as some would call it; he also marvels at the "antimimetic" (65) appeal of Daoist paintings that attempt to break free from the "thing" itself in order to capture the "mystic reverence for nature" (71) that only suggests that thing. What Qian reveals here is a more complex Pound, who was capable of grasping the hidden resemblance of Daoist mystic aesthetics to Whistlerean and Turneresque impressionism, of the symbolism of Wang Wei (699-759) to that of Jules Laforgue, than the Pound who has been seen to monolithically promote Confucianism as...