World Poetry, without Baedeker: The Very Idea

Poetry is perhaps a more neglected genre of world literature than others, probably because poetry does not translate well. Poetry seems to be stubbornly rooted in its native language and embedded in its original cultural context. Thus, it is paradoxical to speak of world poetry as being uprooted or rootlessly "generic," as some sceptics have claimed. But there is a sense in which poetry is one, even though languages are many, as the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky asserts. World poetry has been described and evoked as international, transnational, postcolonial, global, or planetary. All these labels capture some aspects of what world poetry might be, yet they are not quite the same as what is meant by "world poetry."

Ezra Pound was one of the first Anglo-American poets in the twentieth century to envisage a "world poetry." Pound began his career as a poet with the determination, as he recalled in 1913, that he would try to know what counted as poetry anywhere by finding out what part of poetry "could not be lost by translation" ("How I Began" 707; emphasis in original) and also whatever was unique to each language. In 1915, he again affirmed his Goethean conception of literature as involving a criticism of excellence "based on world-poetry" (Literary Essays 225). This "world" perspective of poetry is not only Goethean, but also Arnoldian in some respects. Matthew Arnold had defended the idea of culture as "the best which has been thought and said in the world" (5). Arnold saw the purpose of his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy as "to recommend culture as […] a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically" (5). Pound's conception of the "world" was wider and more specific than Arnold's, however. In 1914, he recognized that "our opportunity is greater than Leonardo's: we have more aliment, we have not one classic tradition to revivify, we have China and Egypt, and the unknown lands lying upon the roof of the world—Khotan, Karashar and Kan-su" (Literary Essays 224). In this, Pound was also heir to a perception of Henry James. Two years before Arnold published Culture and Anarchy, James, in a September 1867 letter to T.S. Perry, highlighted the advantages of being born American:

it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose & assimilate and in short (aesthetically & c) claim our property wherever we find it. To have no national stamp has hitherto been a regret & a drawback, but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen.

(James 23)

Indeed, for Arnold, James, and Pound, the need to become more "worldly" comes out of a deeper concern about one's intellectual disposition. Arnold's idea is that provincialism can be avoided by cultivating an expansiveness of mind and outlook. James's idea is that the American writer is uniquely positioned to fuse and recreate the cultures of the world. Similarly, Pound's idea of "world-poetry" is based on his sense of the great variety and the transcultural universality of the world's best poetic traditions. Pound was a poet in English, but as an American, he was not solely bound by "English" tradition. For Pound, the emerging American poet, establishing his own foothold in the metropolitan literary centre of London, "world-poetry," as the best poetry that has been made and validated in the world, also implicitly claimed to go beyond the metropolitan and imperial (English) centredness. This English centredness that Pound was implicitly challenging was, in essence, the insularity Arnold...