Ezra Pound S Chinese Friends

No literary figure of the past century is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. In this book 162 previously unpublished letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, accompanied by introductions and notes, make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends.

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.

First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound’s understanding—it is fair to say, his appropriation—of the text. Fenollosa’s manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North America and East Asia. Pound’s editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa’s encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry. This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa’s important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound’s deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa’s sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa’s ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition. This masterfully edited book will be an essential resource for scholars and poets and a starting point for a renewed discussion of the multiple sources of American modernist poetry.

Drawing extensively on archival research, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound critically explores the textual history of Pound's late verse, namely Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959). Examining unpublished letters, draft manuscripts and other prepublication material, this book addresses the composition, revision and dissemination of these difficult texts in order to shed new light on their significance to Pound's wider project, his methods and techniques, and the structures of authority-literary and political-that govern the meaning of his poetry. Illustrated by reproductions of archival documents, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound is an innovative new study of one of the most important poets of the 20th century.

Discusses the life of the poet, including his youthful ambition, his education in America, and his years in the London literary scene.

The long-awaited second volume of A. David Moody's critically acclaimed three-part biography of Ezra Pound weaves together the illuminating story of his life, his achievements as a poet and a composer, and his one-man crusade for economic justice. The years 1921-1939 were the most productive of Pound's career. In 1920s Paris, he was among the leading figures of the avant-garde and, in that ambience, he composed an opera, made original contributions to the theory of harmony, and wrote the first thirty cantos of his great epic. Moody explores this creativity in fascinating detail, examining the environment that allowed for some of Pound's greatest work. This period also brought Pound's politics firmly into view and Moody is able to shed new light on his sympathy for Mussolini's Fascism, his invoking Confucian China as a model of responsible government, and his abiding commitment to the democratic values of the American Constitution. Pound is revealed as a great poet and a flawed idealist caught up in the turmoil of his darkening time and struggling, sometimes blindly and in error and self-contradiction, to be a force for enlightenment.

Genius, Confucian, fascist, traitor, peace activist—Ezra Pound—love him or hate him, he is impossible to ignore as one of the most influential modernists and controversial poets of the twentieth century. His life, as Alec Marsh makes clear in this biography, raises vital questions for anyone interested in politics, art, and poetry. No writer of his stature promoted so many acquaintances who would go on to become such distinguished names in their own right—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford were among the many who benefited from Pound’s enthusiasm and editorial suggestions. And without Pound’s generosity to his fellow writers, literary modernism might not have happened, or have been the significant, influential movement that it became. Yet by 1925, Pound himself was living in obscurity in Italy, having trouble publishing his own work. There he became a Mussolini enthusiast and was eventually indicted for treason by the United States before being judged mentally incompetent to stand trial. Marsh takes us inside these years in an attempt to uncover what happened. How did such a great modern artist succomb to such views? Was he a traitor? And was he, in fact, insane? Analyzing Pound’s prose and poetry as well as his magnum opus, The Cantos, Marsh provides clear insights into Pound’s work as well as a coherent account of his troubled life that will be essential reading for students and fans of modernist literature.

In the summer of 1936, Ezra Pound agreed to take on the role of European Correspondent for a newly launched travel journal entitled Globe: The International Magazine. Ezra Pound and 'Globe' Magazine: The Complete Correspondence collects for the first time Pound's writings for the journal and his extensive correspondence with one of its editors, James Taylor Dunn, and the leading writers who Pound himself attempted to recruit for the magazine. Numbering almost forty letters and twenty published and unpublished articles, these writings represent a darkly significant time in Pound's thought as his infatuation with the rise of fascism took root. Annotated throughout and supported by substantial explorations of the historical and cultural contexts of the writings, the book also includes a substantial bibliography of related writings and a biographical glossary of the major figures discussed in the correspondence and writing. Together, these texts represent an important resource for anyone interested in an important phase of 20th-Century literary modernism.