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  • T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism
  • Anita Patterson (bio)

If the global turn in modernist studies has raised new possibilities for comparative literature methodologies, it has also prompted some anxious speculation about what modernism could possibly mean in such a vastly expanded, eclectic field. Critics have usefully explored how Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a frontier “contact zone” applies to modernity’s international spaces of cross-cultural exchange, where power relations still commemorate the history of European imperialism. And Simon Gikandi describes a paradoxical situation where “almost without exception the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive” (457). At the same time that fascination with the exotic and primitive shaped modernist aesthetics, many modernists, as Paul Gilroy observes, self-consciously appropriated “Other” global cultures as a signifier of “cultural insiderism” that affirmed race-based barriers to power and status held by high modernist elites (3).

This same appropriation and cultural insiderism also marked the development of Japonisme, a term coined in 1872 by Philippe Burty, to describe the growing awareness, and passage into Europe, of woodblock prints, manuscript books, sculpture, ceramics, poems, and other artifacts from Japan (Lambourne 11). I hope to show that there is much more to be said and studied about the immense significance of this transpacific dialogue for modernist aesthetics, in the US as well as Europe. My example focuses on Boston, which by the turn of the twentieth century was already home to a vibrant community of scholars, collectors, and connoisseurs dedicated to the study of Asia. Although the modernist poet most often credited for initiating interest in East Asian sources is Ezra Pound, less appreciated is T. S. Eliot’s [End Page 665] enthusiasm. In what follows, I will discuss how Kakuzo Okakura, an art historian and curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) during the time when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, and Masaharu Anesaki, a pioneer in the study of comparative religion who lectured on Mahayana Buddhism there when Eliot was a graduate student, inspired transpacific dialogue that would last the poet a lifetime. This formative encounter with Okakura and Anesaki raised Eliot’s awareness of his family history in a region with longstanding ties to Asia; it nurtured his ambivalent engagement with such Boston-area writers as Emerson, whose prior interest in Confucianism laid a foundation for Eliot’s modernism; and the encounter taught Eliot valuable lessons about moral action and impersonality, culminating in poems such as Four Quartets.

Boston at the turn of the twentieth century had not yet fully developed into what Saskia Sassen calls a contemporary “global city.” But it was already, in Peter Hall’s sense, a “world city” and was well on its way to becoming global. As a center of political power, finance, and national and international trade, Boston was a city whose sea-faring tradition made it one of the world’s wealthiest ports and whose maritime trade connections to Asia were familiar to Eliot well before his years as a student. Eliot’s great-grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, Sr., had been a New Bedford shipowner, and Eliot and his brother were taught to sail, according to his cousin Samuel Eliot Morison, by an “ancient mariner of Gloucester” (234). At Harvard, in a 1909 article written for the Advocate, Eliot recalls a glorious bygone era, during the late eighteenth century, when Salem merchants and mariners worked to open a passage to Asia, transforming the region into a prosperous center for international trade. “Go to Salem and see a town that flourished a hundred years ago in the hightide of New England’s naval energy,” Eliot writes, recalling the heroism of explorer-entrepreneurs who played such a pivotal role in the emergence of a great nation:

Where is the China fleet now? The clumsy barks that sailed to every part of the world? . . . Of the freights which the boats carried in are left only the shawls, the ginger-jars, the carved ivory which the captains brought back from the Orient, the gifts which their descendants are proud to display. . . . The sea trade of the Yankees is...

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