EXPERIMENTS WITH CHINA IN AMERICAN MODERNITY
by
JASON LESTER
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department of Comparative Literature
and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
June 2023
DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Jason Lester
Title: Experiments with China in American Modernity
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Comparative Literature by:
Paul Peppis Chairperson
Michael Allan Core Member
Tze-Yin Teo Core Member
Tara Fickle Institutional Representative
and
Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate
Studies.
Degree awarded June 2023
2
© 2023 Jason Lester under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND.
This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in
unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is
given to the creator.
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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Jason Lester
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Comparative Literature
June 2023
Title: Experiments with China in American Modernity
Experiments with China in American Modernity explores formulations of China within
America’s early and interwar modernist period. I propose the concept of “transpacific
experimentalism” to identify an emergent, sustained aesthetic engagement with China,
grounded in empiricist, scientistic, or otherwise humanist claims, which can be
understood through John Dewey’s theory of creative imagination. This dissertation
resonates with the continuing expansion of new modernist studies, offering new
methodological approaches and archival challenges to a field which has been historically
constricted to a narrow high modernist canon. By tracing a constellation of texts situated
on the disciplinary interstices of modernist studies, Chinese area studies, and Asian
American studies, I do not intend to further horizontally expand the category of American
modernism, but to reveal the extent to which it has always already been historically,
culturally, and aesthetically transpacific–a term which, following Hua Hsu, “describes a
physical space” connecting the United States to Asia, “as well as a horizon of possibility.”
From the transpacific birth and circuits of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and Ezra
Pound’s living Chinese character, to Witter Bynner’s collaboration with Jiang Kanghu and
the recovery of Sino-US poets and scholars of American modernism, this dissertation
4
argues for a new mode of reading which unearths the horizontal aesthetic relations which
emerged across American and Chinese modernity.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my chair, Paul Peppis, for his unflagging faith and diligent
stewardship of this dissertation. Thank you to my committee members Michael Allan,
Tze-Yin Teo, and Tara Fickle for their encouragement, enthusiasm, and grace, and without
which this text would be greatly impoverished. Thank you to the Department of
Comparative Literature and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies for providing financial
support during my years as a graduate student at the University of Oregon, and the support
of the Department of Comparative Literature as a home for this work to grow and thrive.
This dissertation developed out of coursework and conversations with Michael
Allan, Tze-Yin Teo, Paul Peppis, Tara Fickle, Forest Tres Pyle, Yugen Wang, Mark Whalan,
Mark Johnson, and Roy Bing Chan. The William Carlos Williams quotation from which
chapter two takes its name was first brought to my attention at the modernist reading
group facilitated by Paul Peppis and Mark Whalan. Sections of chapters one, two, and three
also appeared in different stages of development at conferences held at the University of
Oregon and University of Calgary, as well as at annual meetings of the American
Comparative Literature Association, Modern Language Association, and Modernist Studies
Association.
Finally, thank you to everyone who has provided their kindness, support, and
inspiration during the various stages of my scholarly development, including (but by no
means limited to) Ken Calhoon, Leah Middlebrook, Steven Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Marilyn
Chin, Joseph Thomas, Joanna Brooks, Ronald Wallace, Charo D’Etcheverry, and Mrs.
Tanner, my high school American English and AP English teacher.
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I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Judy Lester (1952-2020),
my brother, Jim Lester (1983-2016),
my father, Richard Lester (b. 1951),
and my son, Ishaan Lester Singh (b. 2019).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 10
i. The Chinese Laboratory.......................................................................................... 10
ii. Transpacific Experimentalism................................................................................. 14
iii. Chapter Summaries................................................................................................. 29
iv. Note on Chinese Romanization.............................................................................. 39
2. CHAPTER ONE: THE CHINESE CIRCUITS OF HARRIET MONROE AND POETRY
MAGAZINE................................................................................................................... 41
i. The Education of Chinese Children......................................................................... 45
ii. The Chinese Education of Harriet Monroe.............................................................. 57
iii. The Open Door Policy............................................................................................ 67
iv. Conclusion: Westward to Cathay / the Headlong Future Sails................................ 90
3. INTERCHAPTER: “THE ORIENTAL MANNER”......................................................... 94
i. The Emperor Han Heard a Certain Word................................................................ 96
ii. The Successor of Merlin.......................................................................................... 102
iii. Profiles from China................................................................................................. 106
4. CHAPTER TWO: BOXING MATCHES AND / CHINESE POEMS................................ 118
i. Tempest in a China Teacup..................................................................................... 120
ii. The Jade Mountain.................................................................................................. 128
iii. Conclusion: Something to Animate, not to Appropriate......................................... 155
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5. CHAPTER THREE: EZRA POUND’S LIVING CHINESE CHARACTER......................... 162
i. The Chinese Room.................................................................................................. 162
ii. Rays Ideogram........................................................................................................ 164
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................ 207
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1. INTRODUCTION
i. The Chinese Laboratory
there is a stright tradition. Kung, Mencius, Dante, Agassiz.
And that shd/be stressed sometime.
– Letter from Ezra Pound to Achilles Fang, Feb 4 1953.1
In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound relates an apocryphal anecdote concerning the
nineteenth-century Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz. In Pound’s rendition, a
post-graduate student comes to Agassiz to learn from him. Agassiz offers the student a
“small fish” and tells him to describe it. The student responds by laconically identifying it:
“That’s only a sunfish.” Agassiz then asks for a description of it, whereupon the student
“returned with the description of the Icthus Heliodiplokus, or whatever term is used to
conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge….as found in textbooks on the
subject.” Agassiz asks the student again to describe it, whereupon he writes a short essay.
Unsatisfied, Agassiz asks the student, one more time, “to look at the fish.” The anecdote
concludes with an elusive moral: “At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced
state for decomposition, but the student knew something about it.”2
Across the aesthetic primers How to Read and ABC of Reading–the latter largely serving
as a revision of the former–Pound argues for an intervention into Anglo-American literary
studies by way of an explicitly comparative approach. He assays, “‘Comparative literature’
1 Zhaoming Qian, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 129.
2 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; repr., New York, NY: New Directions, 2006), 17–18.
10
sometimes figures in university curricula, but very few people know what they mean by
the term, or approach it with a considered conscious method.”3 Pound advocates for
applying scientistically rigorous “laboratory conditions” to aesthetic judgment and
comparative literary study, observing, “We live in an age of science and abundance,” and
therefore “the proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of
contemporary biologists.”4
Whereas other “allegedly scientific methods” would seek to “approach literature as
if it were something not literature, or with scientists’ attempts to subdivide the elements,”
Pound understood his scientific method as being in opposition to “the method of
abstraction”5; rather, his is a method of empirical close reading, “careful first-hand
examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with
another.”6 In this way, Pound’s scientific method provides a through-line which connects
earlier aesthetic pronouncements, particularly those directed towards or springing from his
engagement with East Asian art: for example, his foundational statements on imagism,
where he famously advocates for “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or
objective,” and to “go in fear of abstractions”7; or his praise of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s
acute perception of “the dominant line in objects,” epitomized by Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability
3 Ezra Pound, How to Read (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1931), 8.
4 Pound, ABC of Reading, 17.
5 Pound, How to Read, 13, emphasis his; Pound, ABC of Reading, 20.
6 Pound, ABC of Reading, 17.
7 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect and ‘A Few Don’ts.’” in Pavannes and Divagations (New York: Knopf, 1918),
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts.
11
to “understand the primitive Chinese ideographs (not the later more sophisticated forms)”
after only “a few days studying the subject at the museum”; or the pair’s consequent,
mutual disgust towards “the lexicographers who ‘hadn’t sense enough to see that that
[Chinese character] was a horse,’ or a cow or a tree or whatever it might be.”8 Castigating
those who may have consumed “textbooks on the subject,” but seemingly hadn’t stopped
to “look” at the composition of the characters themselves, Pound (via Gaudier-Brzeska)
fumes, “what the … else could it be! The … fools!”9
“The museum” referenced by Pound above is the British Museum. Indeed, the close,
empirical study which Pound advocates for in ABC of Reading draws ready comparison to his
own formative years in London–what he calls, in The Cantos, his “British Museum Era.”10
From 1909-1913, Pound read and wrote in the British Museum’s open-access Reading
Room, supplemented with frequent visits by him and companions to the much more
exclusive Print Room.11 This wing of the museum was curated by Laurence Binyon, first as
Assistant to the museum’s Prints and Drawings archive, and later as head of the new
Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings–positions which “gave him responsibility
8 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 46, emphasis mine.
9 Ibid., ellipses in original.
10 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 526.
11 Though Pound was never assigned a research position at the museum, he treated his time at the British
Museum as if it were a “day job” with scheduled work hours. Signing off a brief letter to his father in 1909,
he remarks, “I am already late for my days job at the mausoleum,” replacing “museum” with “mausoleum”
with his typical penchant for puns and catachresis. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929, ed.
David Moody, Joanna Moody, and Mary de Rachewiltz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 208.
Similar remarks can be found scattered across his letters from this period. See, for example, Pound, ibid,
185-187, passim. See also 166, where he claims “Binyon gets paid for doing pretty much what I do in the
museum.”
12
for the Department’s Asian collections in their entirety.”12 In the Print Room, Pound did
not spend his time attending to the study of decomposing fish, but instead found
inspiration for his experiments in modernist poetry and translation among Binyon’s newest
acquisitions of Chinese scroll paintings and Japanese ukiyo-e 浮世絵 woodblock prints.13
Pound states in How to Read that he has “been accused of wishing to provide a
‘portable substitute for the British Museum,’” with the rejoinder that it’s something “I
would do, like a shot, were it possible.”14 Yet in ABC of Reading his description of the
“laboratory conditions” necessary for a scientifically-informed artistic praxis does offer just
such a substitute. Decades after his British Museum Era, Pound provides his readership a
model through which they may access their own portable British Museum Print
Room-cum biology laboratory of the mind. Moreover, within this “laboratory,” Pound
describes the scientific method, in its most concrete aspects, as an “ideogrammic” method,
attesting that Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character is “the first definite
assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism.”15 In Pound’s
laboratory–which can, in the final analysis, be described as his Chinese laboratory–the
Chinese character is rendered not only as the proper ur-subject for close, empirical reading,
but is itself conceived as a model of biological composition and organicist, vitalist intensity.
12 Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104.
13 See Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum, 103-127. Arrowsmith’s research into Pound’s activities at the
British Museum builds on the work of Zhaoming Qian. See by Zhaoming Qian, “Pound and Chinese Art in
the ‘British Museum Era’,” in The Modernist Response to Chinese Art (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press,
2003), 1–21.
14 Pound, How to Read, 8.
15 Pound, ABC of Reading, 18.
13
It is with this model in mind that Pound writes, retrospectively, of “a stright tradition.
Kung, Mencius, Dante, Agassiz”: Confucius (Kongzi 孔子), Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), Dante
Alighieri, Louis Agassiz.16
ii. Transpacific Experimentalism
Pound’s Chinese laboratory may appear to be a sui generis confluence of ideas and areas of
study particular to his own idiosyncratic proclivities; however, this dissertation, Experiments
with China in American Modernity, argues it is demonstrative of the extent to which American
modernity emerges out of an engagement with ideas, people, and things historically,
culturally, and aesthetically transpacific–a term which, following Hua Hsu, “describes a
physical space” connecting the United States to Asia, “as well as a horizon of possibility.”17
I propose the concept of “transpacific experimentalism” to identify formulations of China
in early and interwar American modernist poetry which demonstrate sustained
engagements grounded in rationalist, empiricist, or otherwise humanist claims and which
can be productively read as examples of creative imagination.18
16 Qian, Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, 129. For Pound, “Kung” (and to a lesser extent Mencius) stands in for
several interrelated aspects of Chinese cultural history: Chinese characters themselves; the philosophy of
Confucianism, with which Pound aligned himself beginning in the 1920s; and the Shijing 诗经, variously
rendered as the Classic of Poetry, Book of Songs, or Book of Odes. One of the Five Classics (Wujing 五经), this is the
oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, with Confucius traditionally accredited as its anthologist. For an
example of this slippage, see his anthology Confucius to Cummings, where “Confucius” refers to his Confucian
Book of Odes. Ezra Pound, ed., Confucius to Cummings (New York: New Direction, 1964).
17 Hua Hsu, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2016), 12, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674969285.
18 In Scratches on Our Minds, Harold Isaacs describes sustained engagement with China in this period as
“secondary involvement.” It respectively follows that the “primary involvement” of the Euro-American
14
My usage of the term “experimentalism” follows the American philosopher John
Dewey–a figure who loomed large in interwar China due to his two-year lecture series
within the country from 1919 to 1921.19 Dewey's consequential status within China's New
Culture movement is more or less taken as a given. Shu-Mei Shih, for example, identifies
"John Dewey’s philosophical experimentalism as popularized by Hu Shi" as a significant
influence on Chinese modernists such as Lu Xun 鲁迅.20 Yet Dewey’s status as an
American philosopher of the modernist era is generally ignored or shrugged off by
Anglo-American modernist scholarship, with the most significant work within this avenue
of research remaining George Hutchinson’s account of interracial literary relations in the
Harlem Renaissance.21 In “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Dewey advocates a
philosophy which is compatible with modern lived experience and technological advances,
noting “the extent to which the characteristic traits of the science of to-day are connected
with the development of social subjects—anthropology, history, politics, economics,
language and literature, social and abnormal psychology, and so on.”22 Crucially, this line
of thought doesn’t lead Dewey to the expected conclusion that the humanities need
become “rationalized” by the sciences, but in fact the opposite: he prognosticates that “the
figures of this dissertation is the project of American modernity and Anglo-American modernist poetry itself.
See Harold R Isaacs, Scratches on our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 17.
19 See Jessica Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn, SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and
culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10575830.
20 Shumei Shi, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, Berkeley Series in
Interdisciplinary Studies of China 1 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 85.
21 George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995).
22 John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, ed.
William Pepperell Montague and George Adams (New York: Russell & Russell, 1930), 26,
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1930.html.
15
next synthetic movement in philosophy will emerge when the significance of the social
sciences and arts has become an object of reflective attention in the same way that
mathematical and physical sciences have been made the objects of thought in the past.”23
Accordingly, he argues in Experience and Nature that science should properly serve as the
“handmaiden” of art, rather than let art be subordinated to the sciences.24
The writings of Dewey’s prized pupil and Chinese interpreter, Hu Shi 胡适’s help
elucidate the relationship which Dewey draws between art and science. Hu Shi published
the essay “On Experimentalism (Tantan shiyanzhuyi 谈谈实验主义)” May 2nd, 1919 on the
occasion of Dewey’s first lecture in China–which itself occurred on the eve of student
protests in Beijing on May 4th, 1919, inaugurating China’s May Fourth Movement (Wusi
yundong 五四运动).25 In it, Hu Shi declares, “the experimental attitude is the attitude of a
scientist carrying out experiments in a laboratory 实验的态度，就是科学家在实验室里
试验的态度 Shiyan de taidu, jiushi kexuejia zai shiyanshi li shiyan de taidu,” and “I dare say that
experimentalism is the outcome of the developments of nineteenth century scientists. 我
敢说实验主义是十九世纪科学发达的结 Wo gan shuo shiyanzhuyi shi shijiushiji kexue fada de
shu.” In contrast with other disciplines, Hu Shi identifies science as a conception of the
world operating through dynamic, rather than static relations; likewise, science abjures
appeals to tradition, readily “replacing the old with the new 以新代旧 yi xin dai jiu” when
23 Ibid.
24 John Dewey, Experience and Nature, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
2008), 358.
25 Shi Hu, “Tantan Shiyanzhuyi (On Experimentalism),” Xin Jiaoyu (New Education) 1, no. 3 (May 1919),
https://m.aisixiang.com/data/86772.html. All following translations from this text are mine.
16
newer models and ideals appear which prove to be more accurate or applicable than older
ones. Derived from these principles, Hu Shi argues that science reveals how “Life is activity,
dynamic change, encounters with the outside world, and adaptation to one’s environment
⽣活是活动的，是变化的，是对付外界的，是适应环境 Shenghuo shi donghua de, shi bianhua
de, shi duifu waijie de, shi shiying huanjing.”
Given Dewey’s well-known professional and philosophical interest in education,
Hu Shi argues these attributes of science and life elucidate the proper aims of education:
What is the relationship that actually exists between the application of a “practical
method” and education? The answer to this question is that education is concerned
with cultivating talented students who seek truth from facts. It can’t be reduced to
an endless study of books, but instead is the study of actual things. It can’t be
reduced to rote memorization, which fetters one’s ideas, but instead appraises these
ideas for whether they reflect actual outcomes. It can’t be reduced to beliefs spoken
by our forebears, but instead inquires into these tenets of faith for whether they are
in accord with actual affairs.
实际主义方法的应用，和教育究竟有什么关系呢？这个问题的答案就是，教
育事业当养成实事求是的人才，勿可专读死书，却去教实在的事物；勿可专
背书中意思所束缚，却当估量这种意思是否有实际的效果；勿可专信仰前人
的说话，却当去推求这些信条是否合于事情
Shijizhuyi fangfa de ting young, he jiaoyu jiujing you shenme guanxi ne? Zhege wenti de da’an jiushi,
jiaoyu shiye dang yangcheng shi shi qiu shi de rencai, wuke zhuan du si shu, que qu jiao shizai de shiwu;
wuke zhuan beishu zhong yisi suo shufu, que dang guliang zhezhong yisi shifou you shiji de xiaoguo;
wuke zhuan xinyang qianren de shuohua, que dang qu tuiqiu zhexie xintiao shifou yu shiqing.26
Put another way, in a quotation often attributed to Dewey, “Education is not preparation
for life; education is life itself.” Accordingly, experimentalism, liberal humanist education,
the scientific method, and “cultivation of creative ability 养成创造的能力 Yangcheng
26 Ibid.
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chuangzao de nengli” are all revealed to be embedded within and derive from the processes of
life.27
The sciences are understood as a discipline concerned with arriving at a better
descriptive understanding of what can be understood as “true”–or as Dewey puts it, that
which has “warranted assertability.” Crucially, however, I do not argue that transpacific
experimentalism is necessarily grounded in claims borne out as accurate or true in relation
to China. Pound’s understanding of the Chinese ideogram has been famously–one may also
add continuously–debunked in scholarship, at least as early as George Kennedy’s “Fenollosa,
Pound and the Chinese Character” in 1958.28 Nor is transpacific experimentalism as
discussed here necessarily grounded upon direct, lived experience of Chinese culture and
people, as opposed to encounters which are mediated through a transpacific circulation of
art, literature, and culture. Again, Pound had no meaningful examples of direct experience
with Chinese culture–though this cannot be as easily said of him regarding his
correspondence with contemporaneous Chinese scholars29 Instead, I locate
experimentalism in figures and texts which in their historical context exhibit dynamic
change, transformation, and adaptation of one’s thinking and relationship to the larger
world through transpacific encounters with China.
27 Ibid.
28 George Kennedy, “Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character,” Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5 (1958):
24–36, http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_pound_chinese.html. Informal statements by figures such as Arthur
Waley or Witter Bynner would place the first critiques of Pound’s understanding of the Chinese character
several decades earlier.
29 For significant, if not extensive, examples of Pound’s correspondence with Chinese scholars, see Qian, Ezra
Pound’s Chinese Friends.
18
Given Hu Shi’s linkage of the sciences, “cultivation of creative ability,” and
education, it is significant that Dewey reconfigures “science” so as to be equivalent to
theory, and “art” to practice. Moreover, to bifurcate experience into science or art is for
him merely a provisional distinction between means and ends. To approach science and art
as dualisms or antinomies is thus not reflective of nature and man’s experience within
nature as such, but instead a problem constructed through language. Dewey declares:
When this perception dawns, it will be a commonplace that art—the mode of
activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed
possession—is the complete culmination of nature, and that ‘science’ is properly a
handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue. Thus would disappear
the separations that trouble present thinking: division of everything into nature and
experience, of experience into practice and theory, art and science.30
Following Dewey’s claim that “the complete culmination of nature” is encompassed within
the aesthetic, and Hu Shi’s correlation of experimentalism with “cultivation of creative
ability,” I identify experimentalist aspects of the figures and texts of this dissertation in
light of what Dewey calls “creative imagination.”
According to Thomas Alexander, Dewey’s conception of imagination is a difficult
subject to approach, for imagination appears everywhere in Dewey’s thought–most notably
Art as Experience, his book on aesthetic theory–yet is rarely systematically elucidated.
Moreover, it is a concept unique to Dewey, without direct antecedent in the writings of
William James. Nonetheless, an account can be made of certain characteristics of Dewey’s
approach to imagination. For one, imagination is inherent to all intelligent action, and is an
extension of activity itself: it provides a point or end in view, towards which we can
redirect our actions and go forward in our affairs. In this sense it can be understood to have
a “dramatic” character, as it plays out dialectically (as well as dialogically, within one’s
30 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 358.
19
inner monologue or “soliloquy”) between “what is and what ought to be.”31 Put another
way, and with a different emphasis by Alexander, “meaning becomes consciously
embodied when action undergoes reconstruction through the art of imagination.”32 The
organizational faculties of the mind are often understood as aspects of intelligence, but for
Dewey they are also fundamentally aesthetic, for “no experience of whatever sort is a unity
unless it has esthetic quality.”33 In this way, to treat art as something superficial or
superfluous, as if it were “the beauty parlor of civilization,” is to overlook how works of
art heighten and make advertent to their audience the unifying quality of a situation or
experience, and thereby make that experience apprehensible.34
The significance of this becomes apparent in our aesthetic encounter with works of
art from another time or culture, for “Works of art are means by which we enter, through
imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and
participation than our own.”35 On this point, Dewey agrees with the British modernist T.E.
Hulme. Quoting Hulme’s Speculations, Dewey states, “art cannot be understood by itself, but
must be taken as one element in a general process of adjustment between man and the
31 Thomas M. Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence, American Philosophy Series
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 170.
32 Ibid., 172.
33 Quoted in Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 40.
34 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 344.
35 Ibid., 333.
20
outside world.”36 Following Bergson, Dewey explains that we “install ourselves in modes
of apprehending nature that at first are strange to us. To some degree we become artists
ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience
is reoriented.”37
This description of apprehension, integration, and reorientation in the aesthetic
encounter elucidates a categorical distinction in Dewey between imagination and fantasy.
According to Dewey, “At the best, the fanciful is confined to literature wherein the
imaginative too easily becomes the imaginary.” Instead of providing a psychoanalytic or
sociocultural gloss for the “imaginary,” Dewey denotes it as the aesthetic condition of
fantasy or “fancy,” whereby “a person deliberately gives familiar experience a strange
guise by clothing it in unusual garb.” Rather than a profound reorientation of perception
of our own experiences through the integration of experiences which are not our own,
fantasy is synonymous with a flight of fancy, where “mind and material”–art, artist, and
audience–“do not squarely meet and interpenetrate.” In contrast, works of art which
demonstrate creative imagination make sensible “new fields of experience and disclose
new aspects and qualities in familiar scenes and objects,” as well as embodying possibilities
“that are not elsewhere actualized.”38 This transformation and reorientation of experience
through imaginative thinking and works of creative imagination can be identified with
what Rob Wilson calls “conversion,” in all of the possible resonances carried within the
36 Ibid., 332.
37 Ibid., 334.
38 Ibid., 149.
21
term.39 In this dissertation I argue that its principal Euro-American subjects, Monroe,
Bynner, and Pound, all exhibit this sense of conversion in their encounters with China,
Chinese language, or Chinese art and culture, not only converting these aspects into their
own formulations of Chinese art and culture, but in turn being converted by them as well.
Recalling Dewey’s equivalences of science to theory and art to practice, a
differentiation of imagination from fantasy can be perceived in how he understands
creativity as coinciding with and operating as the praxis of reason: a word which for him
“as a noun signifies the happy cooperation of a multitude of dispositions, such as sympathy,
curiosity, exploration, experimentation, frankness, pursuit.”40 In other words, while
fantasy is an escape from or disregard to experiential relations, Deweyan imagination is not
pure or disinterested but instead caught up in what Jim Garrison describes as our “animal
relations with the world.”41 It is not my claim that the primary figures or texts of this
dissertation should be fundamentally understood as “Deweyan” or were themselves
necessarily in dialogue with his philosophy; rather, as creativity and reason coincide for
Dewey as an “attitude” or “multitude of dispositions” towards the world, “not a
ready-made antecedent which can be invoked at will and set into movement,” so too does
this project attempt to understand the terrain of experimentalism in American modernity as
one which forgoes “ready-made” readings of transpacific entanglements between America
39 Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2009).
40 Dewey, Art as Experience, 196.
41 Jim Garrison, “2012 Dewey Lecture: Making Meaning Together Beyond Theory and Practice,” Education and
Culture 29, no. 2 (2013): 11.
22
and China.42 Instead, it seeks to uncover how these entanglements take a multitude of
forms and dispositions, which include sympathy, curiosity, exploration, experimentation,
frankness, and pursuit.
An important point of consideration when historicizing early and interwar
American modernism is a pervasive, rhetorical separation of poetics and politics which
highly contrasts with contemporary sensibilities. For an example of the latter,
contemporary poet CA Conrad argues in conversation with Dale Smith for the importance
of localized, intentional “families” of poets, rather than artistic communities. Conrad
likewise cites Kaia Sand, a Portland-based contemporary poet, who “chooses ‘avant-garde’
over experimental,” as “‘avant-garde’ implies the social side of the work,” and thereby
carries the potentiality of an “inclusive frame” of “collective action.”43 In sympathy with
this approach, Richard Jean So’s Transpacific Community explores how engagements with
China by writers and artists such as Agnes Smedley, Lin Yutang, Pearl Buck, and Paul
Robeson can be understood broadly as expressions of leftist solidarity and desire for
collective social action.44 Such coalitions are forged through shared social goals and a
desire for mutual aid. Yet in Dewey’s analysis of Matthew Arnold’s dictum, “poetry is
criticism of life,” he argues art is not that which seeks to instrumentally impose upon or
manifest in the reader the moral judgment of the author. Instead, Dewey argues that art is
42 Dewey, Art as Experience, 196.
43 CA Conrad and Dale Smith, “Dale Smith & CAConrad Discuss Dorn, AIDS, and Community That Holds Us
Together & Holds Us to It,” PhillySound: New Poetry, October 31, 2009,
http://phillysound.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html. Mirroring Conrad’s collectivist approach, Smith relates,
“The other day I told my freshman writing class that there are no such things as writers. There are only
communities of writers.”
44 Richard Jean So, Transpacific Community: America, China and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016).
23
operational as criticism “not directly, but by disclosure, through imaginative vision
addressed to imaginative experience (not to set judgment) of possibilities that contrast with
actual conditions.”45 Towards this point, Dewey concludes Art As Experience by quoting
Shelley, insisting that “A man to be greatly good”—and likewise societies, and likewise
art—“must imagine intensely and comprehensively.”46
The early and interwar modernist aesthetic collaborations explored in this
dissertation are forged on the basis of a common aesthetic ground which often overlooks
or is ostensibly disengaged from the involved parties’ sometimes very disparate ends. From
Dewey, Monroe, and Bynner’s small ‘D’ democratic pluralism to Pound’s self-aggrandizing
fascism, the political sensibilities of the figures in this dissertation tend to be quite
identifiable. Yet over and over one finds that these figures themselves resist an
understanding of aesthetic judgment which relegates art to a series of ethical claims or
symptomatic reflections of the political. An attempt to fully square their politics and
affiliative and aesthetic inclinations can then only be understood, in the descriptive sense,
as problematic. In the 1920s Pound, having already grown hostile to American electoralism
and beginning to look to Europe for more authoritarian alternatives, nonetheless
enthusiastically lauded and subscribed to the leftist magazine The New Masses.47 By way of
explanation, he writes to his father, “Can not regard Communism as cure for national
45 Dewey, Art as Experience, 346.
46 Ibid.
47 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 615.
24
imbecility, but the New Masses looks to me about only murkn publication worth the 25
cents per issue.”48
Harriet Monroe likewise shies away from anything which would coalesce identity
politics into an identity poetics. On the occasion of a publication of Poetry featuring only
female poets, she observes, “Quite a number of issues, during our past history, have been
masculine, but this is the first one to speak entirely with feminine.” Nonetheless, she
assures her readership, “The fact that this is a woman’s number of POETRY does not result
from the editor’s deliberate intention.”49 Poetry’s John Reed Prize, endowed by the
journalist’s family after his death in Russia in 1920, was also, surprisingly, stipulated
merely to go to a young poet of merit and promise. Indeed, John Reed’s own publications
in the magazine bore a similar apolitical bent–all the more striking for a man who inspired
communist party clubs named after him in the 1930s, which took up the motto, “Art is a
weapon in the class struggle.” In 1925 the second annual John Reed Prize went to Harlem
Renaissance poet Countee Cullen–with the social significance of a major poetry award
reaching across the color line going entirely unmentioned by Poetry.50 Within
contemporary modernist studies, to say nothing of the humanities at large, to insist on an
absolute autonomy of the aesthetic from the sociopolitical is rightfully untenable–even
48 Ibid., 599.
49 Harriet Monroe, ed., Poetry 20, no. 5 (August 1922): 291.
50 “Announcement of Awards,” Poetry 27, no. 2 (November 1925): 105. The same year, Cullen was the
winner of the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize. Coverage of this win, as well as his runner-up
placement in previous years, consistently references Cullen as a “Negro.” See “Negro Wins Prize in Poetry
Contest; N.Y.U. Student Takes Second Honors Among Undergraduates of 63 Colleges,” New York Times,
December 2, 1923,
https://www.nytimes.com/1923/12/02/archives/negro-wins-prize-in-poetry-contest-nyu-student-takes-second-honors.html; see
also “Countee Cullen 1g, Wins Bynner’s Poetry Award,” Harvard Crimson, November 24, 1925,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1925/11/24/countee-cullen-1g-wins-bynners-poetry/.
25
more so when the texts and relationships at issue plainly arise from the reality of unequal
social, economic and political relations between the United States and China. Yet I follow
the ethos of these figures in resisting a reduction of these texts to a series of vertical
symptomatic readings which renders their aesthetic qualities subordinate to the political.
Instead, I seek to locate these texts within a larger transpacific network of horizontal
relationality which cuts across or reconfigures these vertical relations of power.
The stakes of this dissertation and its approach of transpacific experimentalism can
be contrasted with two recent monographs. As already discussed, in Transpacific Community So
traces journalists, writers, and artists in China and America, weighing their shared
commitments to a broadly conceived socialist or progressive left. Transpacific
experimentalism as it is employed in this dissertation need not identify only figures or
aspects of texts which resist subordination of the aesthetic to the political; indeed, I would
make the claim the primary texts of So’s monograph–from Paul Robeson to Lin Yutang and
Pearl Buck–are each fully assimilable and comprehensible within my construction of a
transpacific experimentalism within American modernity. At the same time, transpacific
experimentalism as a method of analysis instantiates an archive of figures and texts which
are otherwise foreclosed within So’s rubric of politically activated leftist art.51
In contrast with So’s narrowed focus of leftist coalitionality, R. John Williams’
Buddha in the Machine identifies the emergence, beginning in the nineteenth century, of a
construction of “asia-as-techné,” where western artistic sensibilities reflect an
appropriation of East Asia which attempts to suture the aporetic chasm at the heart of
modernity between spirituality (“Buddha”) and technology (“the Machine”). Whereas So
51 So, Transpacific Community.
26
largely addresses figures and texts engaged with China between the 1930s and 1950s,
covering the late interwar period, World War II, and the 1950s Cold War, Williams
expansively reads American and British engagements with China and Japan from the past to
the present. He follows texts such as Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Imaginations or Josephine
Park’s Apparitions of Asia, building upon their formidable literary scholarship by reading
transmedially across subject matter as diverse as the British Arts and Crafts Movement, the
“racial logic of Jack London’s Asia,” the Buddhism of Ernest Fenollosa, Lin Yutang’s
Chinese typewriter, “techné-pop culture,” and post-1950s “techné-Zen” and neoliberal
global capitalism. Given its capaciousness and flexibility, Williams’ conceptual apparatus
threatens to capture all western engagements with Asia writ large within a grand theory of
“asia-as-techné.”52 Transpacific experimentalism argues for the existence of formulations
of China which are aesthetically and socioculturally particularized to the context of
American modernity, and which moreover aesthetically distinguishes between
engagements which evince experiential creativity from those of escapist fantasy; in contrast,
Williams’ apparatus provides no grounds, aesthetic or otherwise, by which one can
properly determine what is and is not “asia-as-techné” within a transpacific context–to say
nothing of other theoretical frameworks such as Park’s orientalist “apparitions,” Huang’s
prismatic “imaginations,” or that which is conceived as concomitant within a broader
transpacific “imaginary.”53 At the same time, transpacific experimentalism provides an
52 R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press,
2014).
53 Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008); Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008). For an excellent example of an application of a “social imaginary” as
derived from cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and Charles Taylor to the transpacific context, see Christina
Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press,
2009).
27
aesthetic framework which extends and enriches the analysis and conclusions of these texts.
For example, Williams meticulously traces how Pound’s editorialship of Fenollosa’s life
and papers, including The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (née The Chinese Written
Language as a Medium for Poetry), served to erase Fenollosa’s spiritual connections to Buddhism.
Williams argues that Pound saw these aspects of Fenollosa’s life as embarrassments which
needed to be excised from his personal history and manuscripts, lest he be accused of not
meeting the criteria of cogent, rigorous scholarship.54 Consequently, while Williams
approaches Fenollosa and Pound in a fashion which interleaves or blurs distinctions
between religion and science, fantasy and imagination, I contend that his own scholarship
attests to how a rubric of transpacific experimentalism is most descriptively accurate in
regards to Pound’s conception of a living Chinese character.
Finally, transpacific experimentalism enables the archival recovery of texts which
have been marginalized within the prevailing disciplinary concerns of modernist studies,
East Asian studies, or Asian American studies. Despite recent work on Asian American
poetry by scholars such as Steven Yao55, early Chinese American literature remains
characterized as largely writing in Cantonese, an articulation of working-class struggle and
resistance, or both. Socially and geographically mobile interwar Chinese poets and scholars
such as Moon Kwan and Jiang Kanghu participated in Anglo-American modernism and
published in venues like Poetry magazine in a period where literary modernism coincided
with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924–yet such figures have lain outside
54 See “Machine/Art: Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, and the Chinese Written Character” in Williams, The
Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West, 86–128.
55 Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity, Global Asias (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
28
prevailing disciplinary concerns of both American modernist studies and Asian American
studies.56 To my knowledge, Moon Kwan’s collection The Jade Pagoda is the first collection of
English poetry published in the United States by a poet of Chinese descent, while Jiang
Kanghu and Witter Bynner’s The Jade Mountain was the first complete English translation of a
collection of Chinese poetry; moreover, it is the first literary collaboration between an
American poet and Chinese scholar. Finally, despite her role as founding editor of the
modernist poetry magazine of record, Monroe herself remains profoundly understudied.
No critical monograph on Monroe currently exists, and her essays and other writings
remain uncollected. This is a surprising state of affairs given the archival turn of modernist
studies in recent decades, as well as conscious efforts to expand beyond the traditional
limitations of the modernist canon–to say nothing of the prominent usage of her name in
the Poetry Foundation’s endowed initiatives, such as the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
and the Poetry Foundation’s blog, titled Harriet.57 Accordingly, this dissertation joins recent
scholarship in seeking a critical reassessment of Monroe appropriate to her centrality within
American modernist poetry.
iii. Chapter Summaries
Chapter one, “The Chinese Circuits of Harriet Monroe and Poetry Magazine,” makes
an intervention into the understudied literary history of Harriet Monroe’s engagements
with China. I argue for an experimentalist reading of Monroe’s formulations of China in
56 For an extensive discussion of the significance of Johnson-Reed in shaping contemporary American
immigration and international policy, see Mae M Ngai, ImpossibleSubjects: Illegal Aliens andtheMakingof Modern
America, 2014.
57 “About Harriet Books,” Poetry Foundation, 2023, https://www.poetry foundation.org/harriet-books/about.
29
light of her transpacific dissemination of Chinese civilizational power, her family ties and
firsthand experiences in China, the “birth of an idea” of Poetry magazine, and its related
aesthetic policy of the “Open Door”, and finally the publication of Sino-US poets and
scholars within Poetry. I open this discussion with a photograph of Monroe wearing a
Chinese tangzhuang, a persistent photograph in the material archive that has remained
underexplained, which I relate to her affinity for China and her understanding of the
centrality of poetry within Chinese civilization. I argue this line of argumentation is borne
out in her article “The Training of Chinese Children,” published in The Century Magazine six
months before the first number of Poetry. In it, she employs the topos of childhood to
explore the socio-economic development of Chinese modernity. She portrays Chinese
people and cultural difference within a larger project of liberal humanism, pushing against
notions that Chinese culture is incommensurable to western understanding or is located in
a petrified past outside of the telos of western historical progress. Though Monroe’s
portrayal of Chinese people as morally upright and physically and intellectually industrious
draws parallels to model minority discourse, I argue that Monroe proves to be a
particularly early example of such an account, which would trouble conventional
periodization; moreover, her account is not directed towards Chinese nationals within the
United States but instead the education of Chinese children within China itself, raising the
question of whether the formation of racial and identity categories within the United States
is the most salient aspect of Monroe’s essay, or whether racial formation in the United
States should instead be encompassed by the larger phenomenon of transpacific
entanglements between the United States and China. What I propose is that Monroe’s
understanding of Chinese culture and the primacy of its literary achievement is not a
construction of the West, but instead a result of the transpacific circulation of China’s own
hegemonic discourse of Chinese civilizational power. For Monroe to take up the notion of
30
Chinese civilization and propagate it as a model for the West then is not only to convert
and appropriate it but also in turn to be converted by it, to perceive in the inter-imperial
exchange of America with China ways in which philosophical and aesthetic conditions
could be otherwise.
Monroe’s sustained interest in China was precipitated by her travels and familial ties
within the country. Through extensive research in the archival record of Monroe and her
extended family, I reconstitute a narrative of Monroe’s 1910 trip to Beijing, as well as the
activities in China of her sister, Lucy Calhoun, and her brother-in-law and American
ambassador to China, William Calhoun. In contrast with Monroe’s recollections in her
unfinished autobiography, Lucy and William Calhoun’s papers are unpublished and
heretofore unexplored in literary scholarship. I relate how William Calhoun’s perspective
on Chinese culture and its relations with the United States belies an essentialized,
chauvinistic understanding of difference between the United States and China from the
standpoint of an assumed western superiority. In contrast, Lucy Calhoun moved back to
China after William’s death in 1916 and continued to live in the country for the next two
decades. Unlike William’s understanding of essentialized racial difference in the name of
political realism, I argue that Lucy’s experiences of China are mediated, like Monroe,
through aesthetics. Both Monroe and Lucy Calhoun understand cosmopolitan life and art
collecting running hand in hand, with Lucy’s patrician connoisseurship of traditional
Chinese fine art and Monroe’s cultivation of Poetry as a venue for modernist poetry
mirroring one another.
Monroe’s “birth of an idea” for Poetry magazine plays out against the geopolitical
relationship of the United States and China in the first half of the twentieth century.
Emblematic of this relationship are the American government initiatives of the Open Door
31
policy and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program. A paternalistic belief in Western
socioeconomic dominance and cultural superiority enabled American policies of an open
door for economic trade with China abroad and exclusion of Chinese laboring classes
domestically. At the same time, the contradictory roles the West held for the Chinese
intellectual and cosmopolitan elite as imperial oppressor, economic partner, and cultural
model were embodied in the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program, which enshrined the
broader legal right of Chinese students to study overseas in the United States. By the 1910s
significant numbers of Chinese students studied in the American humanities, yet the
presence of Sino-US poets and scholars in American modernism were both marginalized in
their own time and omitted from later accounts within Asian American studies and
modernist studies. I argue that Poetry served as a significant venue for these figures within
American modernism, with the magazine’s aesthetic policy of the “Open Door” enabling
the conditional inclusion of the significant transnational and intermedial figures Moon
Kwan and Sun Yu. Their literary pursuits are consequential in and of themselves, with
Moon Kwan publishing the earliest book of American poetry written in English by a poet
of Chinese descent. Yet they are made all the more striking in light of their later careers in
the Cantonese and Shanghai film industries: Kwan co-founded the first Cantonese studio
which followed the Hollywood production model, while Sun directed popular left-wing
films starring the most prominent Chinese actresses of his day. Together, they are
identified as vernacular Chinese modernists who sustained a secondary involvement with
American modernism, to the extent that it served as a “bridge-land” between Chinese and
American poetry and culture.
The first chapter concludes with a discussion of Monroe’s 1934 return to China,
which culminated in Poetry’s 1935 “Chinese Number,” and how she foresees a future
32
where East-West relations are radically reoriented from Kipling’s England and Western
Europe, and towards the “headlong Future” of a new geopolitical alliance of China and
America. Yet Monroe’s own aesthetic preferences often tended towards the poetry of the
early modernist years. In the interchapter, “The Oriental Manner,” I examine an emergent
modernist engagement with China before the “vogue” of Chinese poetry and translation in
the interwar period. Unlike the transpacific experimentalism of Monroe, Witter Bynner,
and Ezra Pound, early modernist poetry by Allen Upward, Vachel Lindsay, and Eunice
Tietjens engaged with a China that was in turn hypothetical, fantastic, and irreconcilable to
American modernity. In Upward’s series Scented Leaves-From a Chinese Jar, his “leaves” offer a
suspension of logic and a decadent derangement of the senses. Rather than the
transformative possibility space of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Upward offers a transportive,
oneiric flight of fancy. I argue that Upward’s poems, which he identifies as “paraphrases”
from Herbert Giles’ History of Chinese Literature, operate in a similar logic as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which likewise obscures the geographical referent and historical
facticity of Kublai Khan’s summer palace north of Beijing in the service of Coleridge’s free
play of imagination. In contrast with Dewey’s generative understanding of creative
imagination, the fantasy of Coleridge and Upward alchemizes intensified experiences of
beauty within an otherwise disenchanted world. Lindsay’s “The Chinese Nightingale”
likewise evinces a lyrical energy which Tietjens compares to magic, evoking an imaginary
Chinese culture and past through which a diasporic, Chinese American subject may
experience a momentary reprieve from a life of cramped, urban tenement walls and the
drudgery of menial physical labor. Like the Hollywood musical, Lindsay’s engagement
with China exists on a continuum of entertainment and utopia: on one end, broad genre
tropes and racial caricatures; on the other, the evocation of a prelapsarian world through
which our own world can be fantasized as otherwise. Yet Tietjens’ Profiles from China is
33
neither entertainment nor utopia, but instead the encounters of a chauvinist Western
speaker with an incomplete Chinese modernity, where both premodern wisdom and
Dickensian industrialization vie with one another for dominance. Adopting Edgar Lee
Masters’ form of free verse dramatic monologue, Tietjens’ poetic reportage reveals a
traveler who does not seek to understand Chinese culture or people, but instead concludes
that the East and West are intransitive and irreconcilable. Though the speaker in Tietjens’
Profiles from China evaluates themself as “insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon,” I interpret
the appearance of the Chinese character for “northern barbarian” on the book’s cover as a
critique of both American and Chinese modernity alike in light of the splendor of Chinese
society represented in Tang-dynasty poetry.
In the second chapter, “Boxing Matches and / Chinese Poems,” I turn to the
modernist debates surrounding the translation of Tang poetry in the interwar period.
Rather than a phenomenon particular to our contemporary age, I argue that contention
over modernism’s translational engagements with China is centripetal to the broader
developments of Anglo-American modernist poetry itself. Moreover, though Cathay is often
treated as sui generis within modernist study, and often the sole point of influence for
literary Chinese translation in subsequent generations, this chapter seeks to recover Bynner
and Jiang’s collaborative translation of The Jade Mountain as a critical text of transpacific
American modernism which stands apart from Pound, Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough,
and Arthur Waley’s Chinese translations. I begin by observing that Tietjens herself made a
similar argument in 1922, evaluating Bynner and Jiang’s poems as “the most satisfying of
the free-verse translations” to date. In contrast, Lowell found herself buffeted on all sides
by both claims of Chinese poetry’s inherent untranslatability and the insufficient quality of
her verse. Lowell publicly fired back against Tietjens in the pages of Poetry, while in private
34
correspondence she fretted over Bynner and Jiang’s translation project and and sought to
undercut their credibility. All the while, Bynner feigned amusement or disinterest towards
Lowell in his public-facing statements, even as his private correspondence with Tietjens
revealed his own personal enmity towards Lowell.
I argue that Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei continues in the
bellicose spirit of these translation wars, where he accuses Bynner of translating as if he
were in a “haze of opium.” By making this claim, however, Weinberger overlooks Jiang’s
contributions to these translations, demonstrating the pervasive invisibility of Sino-US
translators and poets among successive generations of modernist scholars. I contend that
Weinberger’s failure to consider Jiang as an equal partner in The Jade Mountain not only
occludes the collection’s status as the first book-length collaboration between an American
modernist poet and Chinese scholar, but moreover belies Bynner’s engagement with the
transpacific as a network of horizontal relationalities. Accordingly, I trace the origins of The
Jade Mountain to their respective appointments at the University of California, during which
time Jiang fell into Bynner’s eclectic coterie of orbit of undergraduate students and
California bohemian artists. I argue that Bynner’s involvement with China cohered the two
opposed personas of Bynner’s literary work: the kimono-clad, bohemian provocateur, and
the sedulous, stalwart pillar of the Poetry Society of America. Bynner’s engagement with
China was first and foremost aesthetic, operating through an appreciation travel, nature,
and Chinese poetry. Moreover, during his time in China, he frequently eschewed typical
western comforts, opting instead for the vernacular, holistic experience of the “feral
Sinologist.” From Bynner’s time spent with Chinese students and scholars, he began to
understand Chinese culture as “the beauty of direct expression and the simplicity of the
human spirit,” and found these qualities epitomized in classical Tang poetry. Appropriately,
35
he sought to render his translations with Jiang in idiomatic English free verse. Bynner and
Jiang thus favored a middle way between Pound’s ideogrammatic method and Lowell and
Ayscough’s florid, attenuated verse. Indeed, it is through translation of classical Chinese
poetry that Bynner lets go of residual, conservative prosodic habits and becomes modern.
The collection proved to be an immediate success and continues to endure within Chinese
area studies, even as its status remains elided from a prevailing “Pound-to-Rexroth” model
of American engagement and translation of China.
In a discussion of Bynner’s interpretive choices, as well as his personal affinity
regarding the poetry of Wang Wei, I argue The Jade Mountain formulates Chinese culture and
poetics as a celebration of the imminence of lived experience, approaching translation as a
ground of open, prismatic multiplicity. In this way, The Jade Mountain’s approach to China
mirrors the polycultural construction of regulated Chinese prosody itself, which according
to recent scholarship was a result of inter-imperial sociocultural exchange across
premodern Asia. As with Tang poetry’s emergence through the processes of translation, so
too must American modernist poetry be recognized as developing in relation to translations
of Chinese poetry.
While Bynner approaches the Chinese text as “something to animate” within
American modernism, “not to appropriate,” Pound conceives of Chinese poetry, Chinese
culture, and Chinese language as the living, organic material of Anglo-American
modernism itself. Chapter three, “Ezra Pound’s Living Chinese Character,” traces the ways
in which Pound’s modernist approach to poetry is imbricated by both his organicist-vitalist
aesthetics and his transformation of Chinese characters into living, intuitively realized
modernist images. Through my historical analysis of the co-development of Pound’s
theory of the Chinese character — the putative “ideogram” — and his aesthetic,
36
organicist-vitalist theory of Vorticism, I establish a relationship between the “Rays
ideogram” of Cathay and The Cantos and Pound’s understanding of the Vortex in “Vorticism”
as “a radiant node or cluster.” I contend that any account of Pound’s Vorticist project not
only can, but must read the discourses of organicism-vitalism, Vorticism, and
“ideographic” poetics in Pound’s work both in tandem and against one another.
The development of Pound’s aesthetic theory begins with T.E. Hulme and his salon
in in London, where imagism emerged within the group’s engagement with French
Symbolism and Japanese haiku. Pound took early inspiration from Hulme, as well as his
exposure to East Asian paintings curated by Laurence Binyon at the British Museum.
However, Pound’s doctrinal disputes concerning Hulme’s vitalist philosophy led to him
writing Hulme out of the imagist record–a situation which repeats itself when he disavows
Lowell and what he saw as her usurpation of imagism, rebranding his own poetry as
vorticism. Though these events attest to Pound’s desire to assert precise definitional and
authorial control, they also demarcate clear shifts in Pound’s thought. Against competing
scholarship which either omits any reference to Chinese poetry in its account of vorticism
or equates imagism with Pound’s interest in the Chinese character, I argue for a
progression of an understanding of Pound’s aesthetic theory of the image which progresses
from Japanese-based poetics in imagism to Chinese-based poetics in vorticism. In my
reading of “In a Station of the Metro” in “Vorticism,” Pound assimilates his “direct
treatment of the thing” in imagist poetry to a vorticist aesthetic theory of expression as
dynamic, intensive energy.
Pound’s inherits much of his vitalist rhetoric from Walter Pater, and his empiricist
literary approach from the “laboratory conditions” of nineteenth-century biologist Louis
Agassiz. However, unlike his explicit acknowledgment of his literary antecedents, through
37
which he develops a distinctly Poundian lineage of poetry and literature, he is by turn
circumspect, ambivalent, or even hostile towards contemporary aesthetic theorists. In light
of this, I argue Pound’s dichotomy of intensive and extensive art in “Vorticism” comes
directly from Hulme’s vitalist philosophy, despite his early antipathy towards Hulme’s
enthusiasm for Bergson. Likewise, though Pound rejected American intellectual culture
wholesale in favor of European cosmopolitanism, the aesthetic theory of Dewey, Bergson,
Hulme, and Pound all share remarkable overlaps, revealing the relative interpermeability of
organicism, vitalism, and even mechanism in the modernist era when transposed from the
life sciences to the aesthetic sphere. These contemporaneous philosophies provided Pound
with a robust theoretical framework through which he conceptualized his engagements
with China and his understanding of the Chinese character as nonrepresentational image.
In Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, a work whose final
shape was as reflective of Pound’s heavy editorial hand as his later collaboration with Eliot
on The Waste Land, the Chinese character is conceived as the site of immanent, dynamic
creativity. Following Fenollosa’s belief in the luminosity of the Chinese character, with its
ability to bring to light what lays hidden in other languages, Pound adopts the “ideogram”
as the pre-eminent model of language for modern times and develops his own model of
“ideogrammic” reading. I argue it is this final elaboration of Pound’s scientistic conception
of the Image as Chinese ideogram which remains with him throughout his career. Reading
the discourses of vitalism and ideogrammic poetics in Pound’s work with and against one
another opens up fresh readings and lines of inquiry into the pre-eminence of the Chinese
character for Pound and their hypothetical meanings as vorticist Images, as seen in the
modernist motto to “make it new”; Pound discovers this phrase in Legge’s Confucian
translations, reconfiguring the en-face source text into a form both purely visual and
nonrepresentational. While the afterlife of this ideogrammic phrase attests to the ways in
38
which Pound’s legacy has shaped American modernist studies, the “Rays ideogram”
illuminates aspects of Pound’s work which have otherwise lain unaddressed. Through
Pound’s glosses of this character in connection to the intensive, vitalist radiance of the
“Vortex,” the “Rays ideogram” emerges as an Image for not only the Vortex; but also in
the final analysis as a vorticist, nonrepresentational image of Pound himself.
iv. Note on Chinese Romanization
In this dissertation I follow contemporary scholars such as Madeline Hsu in
romanizing Mandarin names, places and people from mainland China using Hanyu
pinyin–the standardized romanization system of the People’s Republic of China since 1958,
and the United States government and press corps since 1979. For example, I render the
name of Witter Bynner’s co-translator as Jiang Kanghu 江亢虎 rather than Kiang
Kang-hu–the latter following a now-archaic Chinese Postal Romanization (Youzhengshi pinyin
邮政式拼音) based upon Herbert Giles’ Nanking Syllabary.58 In the case of pen-names or
abbreviations such as H.T. Tsiang (Jiang Xizeng 蒋希曾) or Moon Kwan (Guan Wenqing
/ Gwan Manching 关文清) I have preserved the romanization which the author used
themselves. (In this regard I am more conservative in my approach than Hsu, who for
example renders the name of the architect I.M. Pei as Yuming Bei; see Madeline Y Hsu.59) I
58 See Lane Harris, “A ‘Lasting Boon to All’: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names,
1896–1949,’” Twentieth-Century China 34, no. 1 (November 2008): 96–109.
59 The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015).
39
also follow this approach concerning names in Cantonese, which generally speaking has no
single romanization scheme prohibitively favored above all others.
40
2. CHAPTER ONE: THE CHINESE CIRCUITS OF HARRIET
MONROE AND POETRY MAGAZINE
In the August 1920 issue of Vanity Fair there is a photo spread of contemporary
figures of arts and letters which the magazine seeks to nominate to a hypothetical “Hall of
Fame.” Among these figures is the poet and editor Harriet Monroe, who appears in the
feature adorned in a Chinese tangzhuang 唐装. The magazine lists the following reasons for
her “nomination”:
Because she is editor of “Poetry, a Magazine of Verse”, the first of its kind in
America; because she herself is an interesting poet…and finally because, as critic,
editor, and anthologist, she is, perhaps, more than anyone else, responsible for the
revival of interest in contemporary American poetry.60
What is left unspoken by the editors is the connection between Monroe’s literary
accomplishments and her impetus to appear in Chinese clothing. What is the significance
of this intertwining of Monroe, contemporary American poetry, and Chinese culture or
style? Should this photograph’s composition be taken simply as a passing bohemian whim
of a poet and literary editor? Alternatively, was China, and East Asia as a whole, so
predominant, so self-evident in the cultural and literary discourse of the day that for the
staff and middlebrow readership of Vanity Fair it simply did not bear mentioning? (As if to
confirm this last suspicion, a profile of a performance choreographed by Michio Ito, the
Japanese dancer and early artistic collaborator with W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, appears on
60 “Vanity Fair,” August 1920, 66.
41
the very next page of the magazine61; a few pages earlier, a series of “Limehouse Sketches”
from Thomas Burke, whose collection Limehouse Nights [1916] served as the source material
for D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms [1919]).62
The Vanity Fair photograph reappears in a 2021 feature on the website of the Poetry
Foundation concerning the “History of Poetry Magazine.” Our present moment having a
much different relationship to costuming oneself in the dress of another culture, the
photograph is now accompanied by a brief explanatory caption: “Harriet Monroe dressed
in clothing she had purchased on a recent trip to China, c. 1910.” As with Vanity Fair a
century earlier, any possible connections between Monroe, Poetry, and China are entirely
absent from the Poetry Foundation’s official narrative save for this one persistent photograph.63
A similar situation is borne out regarding Monroe’s “birth of an idea” to publish a
little magazine solely dedicated to poetry. In the “Guide to the Harriet Monroe Papers,”
housed in the University of Chicago Library, this phrase appears in reference to a collection
of Monroe’s letters: “1910, [More] travel letters, written on Monroe’s trip around the
world, from Moscow, Siberia, etc. Upon return from this tour her ‘birth of an idea’-to
found a poetry magazine-occurred.” Both the first monograph account of Monroe’s life
and more recent, oft-cited research on the magazine’s founding omit the trip altogether.64
61 Ibid., 67–68.
62 Ibid., 61.
63 “History of Poetry Magazine.” Poetry Foundation, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/history.
64 Daniel Cahill, Harriet Monroe (New York, NY: Twayne, 1973); John Timberman Newcomb, “Poetry’s
Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and
Bibliography 15, no. 1 (2005): 6–22, doi:10.1353/amp.2005.0011.
42
Another, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance, fleshes out this account while sticking to a
similar set of story beats, with Poetry providing Monroe with “something new for her to
do” after her return “from a trip to the Orient.”65
A different origin story was once suggested by Monroe herself, though to my
knowledge it has never been discussed in scholarship. In a 1916 interview with the New
York Tribune, she confessed, “The idea of bringing out the magazine came to her in China”:
“I had been visiting in China, returning to the United States early in 1911,” she
said. “Poetry there was an art highly recognized, while in the United States it was
certainly languishing. I brought back with me a determination to do something for
the cause of poetry in America.
“It seemed to me there were plenty of good poets, but they weren’t known…The
people of the country needed to be made aware of their existence, of the songs they
were singing unheard. In short, I returned from China with Walt Whitman’s
immortal phrase about great audiences on my lips.”66
This is a very different telling of Monroe’s “birth of an idea” for Poetry than one which
erases China from the narrative altogether, or renders it as one of many miscellaneous,
incidental, or unnamed stops–“Moscow, Siberia, etc.”–along Monroe’s path towards
becoming a foci of Anglo-American modernist poetry. If an archive is a horizontal
collection of available information, a narrative is necessary to organize a hierarchy of
relevance within that information and cohere it into meaning. What that narrative cannot
cohere and relate is passed over in silence. In this chapter I speak back to the silences of
Monroe’s archive by re-mapping the transpacific birth and development of Poetry magazine.
Despite her role as founding editor of the modernist poetry magazine of record, Monroe
herself remains profoundly understudied. No critical monograph on Monroe currently
65 Ellen McWilliams, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: the First Ten Years of Poetry: 1912-1922 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977), 13.
66 “Boomer of Poets Wants Them Subsidized,” New York Tribune, April 2, 1916, Sunday edition, Harriet
Monroe Papers, Box 22, Folder 7, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
43
exists, and her essays and other writings remain uncollected. This is a surprising state of
affairs given the archival turn of modernist studies in recent decades, as well as conscious
efforts to expand beyond the traditional limitations of the modernist canon–to say nothing
of the prominent usage of her name in the Poetry Foundation’s endowed initiatives, such
as the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and the Poetry Foundation’s blog, titled Harriet.67
Accordingly, this dissertation joins recent scholarship in seeking a critical reassessment of
Monroe appropriate to her centrality within American modernist poetry.68 This chapter
seeks to establish an understanding of Monroe’s experimentalism in light of her
transpacific dissemination of Chinese civilizational power; her family ties and firsthand
experiences in China; the "birth of an idea" of Poetry magazine, and its related aesthetic
policy of the "Open Door"; and finally the publication of Sino-US poets and scholars
within Poetry.
67 “About Harriet Books,” Poetry Foundation, 2023, https://www.poetry foundation.org/harriet-books/about.
68 For an example of recent scholarship which stands apart from the standard omissions of China in Monroe’s
biography, see Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2017). The monograph’s author, Liesl Olson, is a director at the Newberry Library in
Chicago where the Monroe family papers are held, and her research gains much insight from the author’s
access to this and other major collections of the Chicago area. Olson reads Monroe’s trip as a perspectival
recalibration which emboldened her to embark on her new literary venture, rather than a direct antecedent
which fundamentally shaped the direction of the magazine itself (ibid., 50). For Olson, Monroe’s ties to
China are one more piece in the puzzle of the literary and cultural history of the Chicago Renaissance and its
wider national and international connections. Her historical research on Monroe is indispensable, even as her
interpretive claims are limited by the considerable scope of her project and her own academic background.
Let one instance stand in for many: she identifies Eva Watson-Schütze, of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, as
the photographer of Monroe’s portrait in Vanity Fair, while also misidentifying Monroe’s garment in the
photograph itself as a Japanese kimono (Olson 2017, 8). Additionally, her research does not consider the New
York Herald clipping which I cite from the University of Chicago Special Research Collection.
44
i. The Education of Chinese Children
In March 1912, six months before the first number of Poetry, Monroe published an
article in The Century Magazine titled “The Training of Chinese Children.”69 Originally titled
“The Education of Chinese Children” in manuscript,70 the essay’s print title echoes W.E.B.
Du Bois’ “Of the Training of Black Men,” published a decade earlier in The Atlantic.71
Though Monroe’s article is indeed about Chinese education, it is not confined to that topic
alone; instead it employs the topos of childhood to assay a wide range account of Chinese
culture–particularly northern Chinese culture–through a mixture of anecdote, reportage,
and ethnographic narrative fiction.
The article begins with a racialized defamiliarization of her subject: “When the little
new-born Chinese child first furls up his Oriental eyelids under the unwrinkling flesh, his
little black eyes, through their narrow slits, look up into smiling faces.”72 Monroe’s
attention to phenotypical difference is indicative of how, here and elsewhere in the article,
her prose lapses into that of the typical literary writer playing at the role of amateur
ethnographer. In the next paragraph she makes a passing reference to that nadir of Chinese
69 Harriet Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” Century Magazine, March 1912.
70 Harriet Monroe, “The Education of Chinese Children,” n.d., Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 22, Folder 7,
Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
71 W.E.B. Dubois, “Of the Training of Black Men,” The Atlantic, September 1902,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1902/09/of-the-training-of-black-men/531192/.
72 Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” 642.
45
cultural critique, male chauvinism, with the mother sighing with “divine relief–for this
child of her hopes might have been a girl.” The text then makes an unexpected swerve,
providing her reader with a description of this household which is both empathetic and
inviting: “It is winter in Peking; a thin dry snow-dust is trying to veil the persistent
sunshine out of doors, and through the paper panes of the windows cold air sifts into the
tiny bedroom. But a fire is glowing softly under the bed, and the heavy stone slab keeps
mother and baby warm.”73.
As Lorenzo Thomas puts it, “Cultural inventories are usually excited manifestos or
jeremiads. What is interesting and instructive is to compare such pronouncements from
various decades. In that way, we can chart the movement of the glacier.”74 Indeed, what at
first glance in Monroe seems to be a predictable, monolithic account of Chinese difference
soon reveals considerable complexities. Details ranging from her descriptions of the
“one-story roofs” of Chinese courtyard siheyuan 四合院 houses, the “wall-within-wall”
and “narrow” lanes of hutong 胡同 residential blocks,75 and the aforementioned fire
“glowing softly under the bed” in each household are not indicative of a general account
of the country but instead a particular familiarity with Beijing and northern China. Monroe
is also at great pains to make distinctions across class lines: while the lower classes may still
cling to superstition and follow old traditions, it is quite a different story for the
western-educated cosmopolitan set:
73 Ibid.
74 Lorenzo Thomas, “W.S. Braithwaite Vs. Harriet Monroe: The Heavyweight Poetry Championship, 1917,”
in Reading Race in American Poetry, ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000),
84.
75 Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” 646.
46
We are presupposing that the baby’s parents are of the middle class. If they are very
poor, there are fewer gifts and less general rejoicing, but essentially the story is the
same. If, however, they are of the upper class, all the old symbolism, while perhaps
observed in part, is weakened. For among princes and mandarins, whether Manchu
or Chinese, foreign ideas have been gradually drifting in during the last
half-century. It may be that the little heir of a new age is born of an educated
mother, who has perhaps studied in a Virginia boarding-school or even graduated
from Bryn Mawr, while his father may have gone through Cornell and traveled
around the world. Even if his parents have not joined the westward procession,
they have seen something of foreign life, have traveled on railroads, and felt the
strong current of new ideas. Under such influences the old religious observances
have become negligible superstitions or poetic symbols.76
Other signs of Chinese socio-economic modernity abound for Monroe. She reports that the
young hostess of a family “offers her Occidental guest tea or champagne, or both”77;
moreover, “foot-binding has already ceased to be the fashion,” and in any event “In
northern China many women have natural feet, as the Manchu conquerors have never
followed the custom.”78 Meanwhile, deeper Chinese values remain unchanged by the
changing times, particularly “the Chinese love of children” and the child’s reciprocal “code
of reverence” for their parents.79
Monroe’s article appears at a moment of crisis in the Chinese education system,
viewed internally as obsolete and ill-equipped to position China as a power on the world
stage or repel further colonization by Europe, America, and Japan. In 1905, the civil service
examination system was abolished, which had been the primary method of entrance into
76 Ibid., 644. As it happens, Hu Shi, purported by one scholar to be the “the Greatest Cornellian,” was at the
time of this publication enrolled at Cornell; see Aaron Coven, “The Case of Hu Shih as the ‘Greatest
Cornellian’,” Cornell Chronicle, November 25, 2014,
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/11/case-hu-shih-greatest-cornellian.
77 Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” 646.
78 Ibid., 651.
79 Ibid., 646.
47
government–albeit with occasional disruption–since the sixth century, and nominally the
entire purpose of systematized education itself.80 In response, scholars of the burgeoning
New Culture movement would seek to reform Chinese society by adopting western
scientific, socioeconomic, and aesthetic models. Although Monroe publishes her essay less
than a year after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution 辛亥革命, inaugurating China’s Republican
period, she reckons that it is these educational reforms which in fact are “more
revolutionary than the overthrow of a dynasty.”81
Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. She estimates, “Probably
Chinese mothers, like those of other nations, vary as disciplinarians. As a Chinese teacher in
Peking expressed it, ‘Different families much different: good families children trained,
children obey; foolish families’–with a gesture of disgust-’mei yo, mei yo.”82 Her approach to
locating Chinese cultural difference within a larger liberal humanism mirrors the kind of
project prescribed by Lin Yutang in My Country and My People (1935):
That seems to me to be the only way of looking at China, and of looking at any
foreign nation, by searching, not for the exotic but for the common human values,
80 For an account of the transition of China’s “age-old” civil examination system into a modern system for a
new, internationally-educated professional class–and its associated growing pains–see Weili Ye, Seeking
Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001),
61-67. In a telling moment, Ye relates, “Students of engineering, law, and medicine, for instance, were
placed in the ‘fourth class’ [of the 1905 examination administered by China’s Board of Education] and were
thereby unable to receive the jinshi [进士] degree [the highest examination degree]. A chief examiner
justified this discrimination by explaining that since time immemorial the degree of jinshi had been conferred
only upon literary men” (ibid., 63–64).
81 Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” 648.
82 Ibid. Another interlingual appearance of this idiom (meiyou, meiyou 没有，没有）comes at the conclusion of
Peter Wang’s film A Great Wall (1986): Leo Fang (played by Wang) has a college-age son named Paul who has
just returned from a trip to Beijing with his family. Talking to his white girlfriend Linda, Paul says, “People in
America think I’m too Chinese, and people in China think I’m too American. What do you have to say about
that?” Linda responds, “mayo, may-yo.” Paul corrects her, saying, “No, no, mei-you, mei-you,” enunciating the
phrase with an erhua 儿化 Beijing dialect.
48
by penetrating beneath the superficial quaintness of manners and looking for real
courtesy, by seeing beneath the strange women’s costumes and looking for real
womanhood and motherhood, by observing the boys’ naughtiness and studying
the girls’ day-dreams.83
Both Lin and Monroe’s anonymous Chinese teacher recall the Confucian teachings of the
Three Character Classic (Sanzijing), which Monroe excerpts in both Herbert Giles’
transliteration and translation, and which begins:
Men in the beginning are fundamentally good.
Their nature is close to one another, even as their habits are far apart.
If they are not instructed, their nature will deteriorate,
So instruction must be done with care and concentration.
(ren zhi chu, xing ben shan / xing xiang jin, xi xiang yuan / gou bu jiao, xing nai qian / jiao zhi dao,
gui yi zhuan 人之初，性本善。 / 性相近，习相远。 / 苟不教，性乃迁。/ 教
之道，贵以专; translation mine.)
She describes it as a “medieval homily of the thirteenth century [which] was for six
hundred years ‘the foundation-stone of a Chinese education,’” and in her reckoning “still
the basis of a Chinese education.” At the same time, she cautions, it “is not the only thing
offered to students. By imperial decree, modern sciences, mathematics, military drill,
calisthenics, English or some other secondary language began to sweep away much of the
ancient lumber of classical learning.”84 In short, Monroe perceives a progressive tide of
western education in a dynamic, modern China, bolstered by and compatible with China’s
own traditional cultural values. Explaining how this could be so, Monroe proclaims, “the
ideals of the race have always been for scholarship rather for war, for mental rather for
physical accomplishment, and the hero-tales told to children show ambitious youth
arriving at prodigious learning, and consequently high office in the state, after many years
83 Yutang Lin, My Country and My People (New York, NY: The John Day Company, 1935), 15.
84 Monroe, “The Training of Chinese Children,” 650.
49
of incredible labor and self-denial.”85 Certainly, each of Monroe’s generalizations are quite
doubtful. To give one obvious example, her appeal to Chinese cultural ideals loses sight of
the actual “naughtiness” and “day-dreams” of early twentieth-century children in China,
who like today were likely much more interested in fantasy, adventure, and war of the
kind depicted in the vernacular novels Journey to the West (Xiyouji 西游记), Outlaws of the
Marsh (Shuihuzhuan 水浒传), or Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Yuanyi 三国演义),
rather than hagiographic parables of Confucian officials86; moreover, language like “the
ideals of the race” discloses the faulty shorthand of her time which conflates culture, nation
and race together–compare it to Pound’s maxim in ABC of Reading (1934) that “Artists are
the antennae of the race,” for example.87
How should Monroe’s claims be interpreted? Given her appraisal of Chinese people
valuing upright morality, intellectual achievement, and hard work, it is tempting to read
her essay as an appeal to China as a nation of model minorities. The historical formation of
Asian model minority discourse in the United States is generally ascribed to American
geopolitics after World War II, shaped by the material conditions of immigration quotas
and the ideological battles of the Cold War.88 As such, Monroe is better read alongside
85 Ibid.
86 For a contemporaneous personal account see “Achang yu Shanhaijing 阿长与山海经” (“A’chang and the
Classic of Mountains and Seas”), Lu Xun, “阿长与《山海经》,” Baidu Baike, 1926,
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%98%BF%E9%95%BF%E4%B8%8E%E3%80%8A%E5%B1%B1%E6%B5%B7%E7%BB%
8F%E3%80%8B/255512.
87 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; repr., New York, NY: New Directions, 2006), 81.
88 For a representative account, see Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017),
https://archivesquebec.libraryreserve.com/ContentDetails.htm?id=1443171; for a discussion of how liberal American
goodwill and charity towards East Asia after World War II is reconstructed around a free, democratic Asia and
50
recent scholarship which evaluates the ways in which Chinese and American academics and
writers antecedent to the formation of model minority discourse sought to positively shape
public perception and policy concerning China’s people and culture.89 A primary example
is what David Leiwei Li contemptuously identifies as a discursive turn towards “[affirming]
Chinese humanity by resorting to an unpracticed ancestral high culture.”90 Though the
broad strokes of Li’s account are accurate, it is also limited to the United States,
misconstruing its transpacific origins. Monroe also troubles Li’s periodization, appearing
two decades before his own examples of My Country and My People and Pearl Buck’s The Good
Earth (1933).91 Additionally, as is the case with the The Good Earth, reading Asian American
identity into texts geographically conceived in or thematically concerned with China raises
the question of whether the formation of the racial and identity category of Asian American
is best understood as separate, intersectional, or subsidiary to the larger phenomenon of
transpacific entanglements between the United States and China.92
an equally opposed “lost” China and its associated communist-bloc, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism:
Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2009).
89 See Madeline Y Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2015); For an account of H.T. Tsiang’s appeals to such figures during the legal battles over
his immigration status, see Hua Hsu, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674969285.
90 David Leiwei Li, “The Production of Chinese American Tradition: Displacing American Orientalist
Discourse,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 1992), 322.
91 This is particularly relevant in the case of Buck, a white renounced missionary who from 1892 to 1934
had spent all but four years of her life in China – and three of those at a woman’s college in Virginia, where
she would later recall how her white classmates considered her “Chinese” and addressed her with racist slurs;
for examples of recent work attentive to these problematics in Lin and Buck, see Richard Jean So, Transpacific
Community: America, China and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
See also Hilary Spurling, Buck in China (London: Profile Books, 2011).
92 The ramifications of this question extends beyond Asian American literature and reaches to the project of
English studies as a whole. On one side, Rey Chow provocatively notes, “Asian American studies is grouped
51
Monroe’s subject in “The Training of Chinese Children” is nominally Chinese
education, and it is incontrovertible that literature played a central role in it through its
codification in the imperial examination system until its abolishment in the early 1900s. In
this way, literary mastery directly translated into sociopolitical capital and prestige. Before
the modern construction of “literature,” or wenxue 文学 following western models,
Chinese literary, scholastic, and philosophical modes of writing were to a degree
inextricable from one another; certainly they were all forms which were valid as objects of
aesthetic appreciation.93 Moreover, in contrast with the conventional belief that western
literature emerges from an epic or narrative tradition, it could be argued that “Chinese
literary tradition as a whole is a lyrical tradition,” as famously articulated by Chen Shixiang
(Chen Shih-hsiang 陈世骧).94 It was against this cultural backdrop in which Monroe
together with ethnic studies rather than with English studies, even though English studies should, properly
speaking, long have been renamed Western European studies or British American studies—indeed, made a
subspecialty of ethnic studies.” Rey Chow, TheProtestant Ethnic andtheSpirit of Capitalism(New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 126; on the other, Chris Patterson argues for reading practices which categorize
Asian American literature “as neither Asian nor American, but as transpacific Anglophone, a category that
stresses encounter and exchange.” Christopher Patterson, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 25.
93 Michael Hockx and Kirk Denton, Literary Societies of Republican China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008),
56-57; see also 52-59 passim. According to Michael Hockx, wenxue originated as “a translation of the Western
concept of ‘literature’ as it was originally understood in the nineteenth century; for Chinese writers and
critics trying to distinguish their activities from those of others in terms of genre, it was a useful concept,” for
it served as “a novel combination of genres possessing (scholarly) respectability and relevance”; Rather than
facilitating a horizontal expansion of what could be identified as the literary, Hockx argues that the primary
use-value of the concept of “literature” for modern Chinese literary societies was its exclusionary quality, so that
entire genres, styles, and communities could be dismissed as non-literary.
94 Shixiang Chen, “On Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Opening Address to Panel on Comparative Literature, AAS
Meeting, 1971,” Tamkang Review 2.2/3.1 (1971–1972): 20; See also Dewei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern
Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 12. David
Wang-Der Wei neatly summarizes the discussion and debate which surrounds Chen’s claim: “Chen indicates
that his appraisal of Chinese literature presupposes his reflection on the Western canon, and that he proposes
the ‘lyrical tradition’ as a way to respond to the (Western) assumption that all literature originates with the
epic and drama. Behind his postulation of the quintessential Chinese lyrical tradition, therefore, is a
self-conscious effort to rectify the Occidental format of temporality: to the predominant Western literary
tradition, there exists in China a distinct counterpart. Chen’s emphasis on the lyrical as the ‘orthodoxy’ of
Chinese (and even Far Eastern) literature nevertheless smacks of essentialism on its own terms. He verges on
being excessively inclusive when enlisting the multiple forms of Chinese literary expressions in a monolithic
52
declared, “I returned from China with Walt Whitman’s immortal phrase about great
audiences on my lips.”95
To fully explore how China’s literary past could weigh so heavily on Monroe’s
cultivation of an audience for modern American poetry, we must in the final analysis read
China’s role as a cultural model not in light of America but instead in light of China.
Monroe’s position resembles nothing less than a return to that taken by eighteenth century
intellectuals such as Voltaire and Leibniz, whose fascination with Chinese material and
intellectual culture preceded the European colonialism and American exclusion laws of the
nineteenth century.96 Before the long nineteenth century of national humiliation (guochi 国
耻), civil unrest, and the Opium Wars and unequal treaties, China enjoyed sustained
hegemonic cultural dominance in East, South, and Central Asia. According to Michael
Schuman, China’s “glittering attraction” has always lain in what he calls China’s
“civilizational” power.97 In a podcast interview, he elaborates on how civilizational power
operates as “the foundation of Chinese power through its entire history”: “China was not
‘lyrical tradition.’ Furthermore, by streamlining other East Asian literary traditions into one ‘Chinese lyrical
tradition,’ he displays a symptom of Sinocentrism similar to the Eurocentrism he sets out to critique. Chen
never had an opportunity to elaborate on his essay, however: he passed away a few months after his AAS
presentation.”
95 “Boomer of Poets Wants Them Subsidized.”
96 Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); for a
discussion of America’s “patrician Orientalism” before widespread Chinese immigration, see John Kuo Wei
Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, Md: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001); for a horizontal reconceptualization of literary modernity as a global,
simultaneous phenomenon predicated upon circuits of silver trade between the New World, Europe, and East
Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, see Ning Ma, The Age of Silver: the Rise of the Novel East and West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Of particular note is Ning Ma’s exploration of how Goethe’s
concept of Weltliteratur is instigated by his interest in a second-rate Chinese novel that becomes popularized in
18th century Europe as a byproduct of these trade routes.
97 Michael Schuman, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2021),
596–97.
53
always politically unified. It was very often not a very strong military power…But what
was the source of Chinese power? Well, it was still basically the foundation for civilization
in East Asia. And that didn’t change…until the dominance of the west, starting in the late
nineteenth century.”98
Surprisingly, nearly a century earlier Dewey comes to similar conclusions as
Schuman, using almost identical language. In a 1922 essay, the same year in which he
published “Racial Prejudice and Friction,” he writes these concluding remarks:
In putting down, largely in western terms, these suggestions about the philosophy
of the Chinese, one is painfully conscious of their inadequacy. But even so, they
show why the Chinese maintain such confidence in the outcome of events, in spite
of so much that is discouraging. China has survived many such periods. But after a
while the civil power, that is, the moral and intellectual, has reasserted itself, and the
stable industry of the people has again become dominant. Even now, in spite of
conditions that would throw any western state into chaos, there is steady progress
among the people.99
Although the rhetorical contours of China’s civilizational power indeed emerge in the twentieth
century “largely in western terms,” it is wrong to understand it as a construal of the west.
Instead, it is a discourse rooted in China’s own imperial project, where the Chinese word for
“China,” Zhongguo 中国, became metonymically transformed from its original reference to
a collection of states centrally located around the plains of the Yellow River into the
“middle country,” positioned at the center axis of its own known world. Similarly, Huaxia
华夏, originally referring to China’s legendary Xia dynasty, denotes transhistorical,
98 Kaiser Kuo, "'Superpower Interrupted': A Conversation with Veteran China Journalist Michael Schuman
about his Chinese History of the World," Sinica Podcast, June 11, 2020,
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sinica-podcast/id1121407665.
99 John Dewey, Anne S Sharpe, and Carl Cohen, “As the Chinese Think,” in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston, vol. 13 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 225, emphasis mine.
54
hegemonic and centripetally assimilative aspects of Chinese civilization.100 In a similar way,
the Han (202 BCE-220 CE) and Tang (618-907 CE) dynasties serve as various appellations
for Chinese people and culture, variously employed in terms which refer to non-ethnic
minority Chinese people (Han minzu 汉民族; Tangren 唐人), Chinese written characters
(hanzi 汉字, more often known in English by the Japanese onyomi 音読み loanword
“kanji” 漢字), reconstructed pre-Qing clothing (hanfu 汉服), Qing-dynasty clothing, or
tangzhuang adopted from Manchu (Manzu 满洲) fashion, and overseas “Chinatown”
communities (Tangren jie 唐人街). These floating signifiers attest to a hegemonic discourse
of the dynamic continuity of Chinese cultural heritage, practices, and beliefs, undergirded
by pre-modern concepts such as the imperial mandate of heaven (tianming 天命), by which
a dynasty legitimates its rule (or, once lost, is subsequently supplanted), and tianxia 天下,
“all under heaven,” which served as a “Chinese conceptual naming of temporal and spatial
boundaries” before the modern importation of the western concept of a “world” (shijie 世
界).101 As the first lines of the fourteenth-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguoyanyi
三国演义) instruct, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
100 Those who read the phrase “civilizational power” and hear in it overtones of the “civilizing” project of
colonialism are not off the mark. See for example Eric Schluessel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing
Central Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
101 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity 1900-1937 (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1995), 342. According to Lydia Liu, shijie arrived in China as a “return” loanword from the
Japanese, sekai, following the onyomi 音読み, or Japanese “sound reading” of the characters as derived from
historical Chinese.
55
Thus it has ever been” (Huashuo, tianxia dashi, fen jiu bi he, he jiu bi fen 话说天下大势，分久必
合，合久必分).102
Schuman’s reading of China as a transhistorical superpower has at times been
criticized as a “repetition of China’s own propaganda.”103 Such criticism overlooks that, in
a general sense, this is precisely his project: to recover in the literary and historical record the
ways in which China understood and argued for its own exceptionalism. As with Lin and
Buck, this critique is also suggestive of a certain unease with the author’s lack of dispassion
and critical distance from his subject. Whether ensconced in language like “ideals of the
race” or huaxia, the transpacific circulation of Chinese civilizational power is an imperial
discourse of assimilation and cultural continuity, one which troubles and extends fixed
understandings of race and nation. To take up the notion of Chinese civilization and
propagate it as a model for the west then is not only to convert and appropriate it but also
in turn to be converted by it, to perceive in the inter-imperial exchange of America with
China ways in which philosophical and aesthetic conditions could be otherwise.
In retrospect, Monroe’s enthusiasm for China wasn’t out of the ordinary among her
milieu of poets and public intellectuals; indeed, in a word it could be described as nothing
less than quintessentially modern. Her essay did, however, predate nearly all other
involvement with China among Euro American modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, the
102 Guanzhong Luo, Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel, trans. Moss Roberts (2004; repr., Oakland, CA: University
of California Press, 2020). See also Schuman, Superpower Interrupted, 39. For recent scholarly work which
historicizes this understanding of hegemonic Han culture, see for example Ban Wang, ed., Chinese Visions of
World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
103 Philip Bowring, “Review of Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World,” Asia Sentinel, July
19, 2020, https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/book-review-superpower-interrupted.
56
sine qua non of transpacific American modernism.104 Pound would opine in his later years
that he never made it to China.105 Monroe, significantly, did. In fact, pace Eric Hayot,106 it
was through a curious twist of fate that their relationship to one another was also tied up in
“a certain relationship to China” well before the publication of Cathay (1915): Pound’s
collection Personae (1909) had been personally recommended to Monroe in London by his
publisher Elkin Matthews, and it was this book that she read on the Trans-Siberian Railroad
in 1910 as she made her way to Beijing.107
ii. The Chinese Education of Harriet Monroe
Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “On or about December 1910 human nature
changed.” As it happens, this was very much the case for Monroe. In the late fall of 1910
Monroe arrived in Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Express. There she stayed three months
with her sister Lucy and her brother-in-law William Calhoun: a lawyer, one term
representative in the Illinois legislature, childhood friend of former President William
McKinley, and recently appointed American ambassador–or, according to his official title,
104 See, for example, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 311.
As will be discussed at length in chapter three, Pound’s pivot towards China began in the fall of 1913.
105 Zhaoming Qian, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.
106 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (2004; repr., Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2011), 8.
107 Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life; Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 223,
https://www.worldcat.org/title/A-poet’s-life-seventy-years-in-a-changing-world/oclc/756464.
57
Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to China. In Monroe’s autobiography, A
Poet’s Life, unfinished at the time of her death in 1938, she relates it the following way:
“1910–came my journey around the world. My sister’s husband, William J. Calhoun, had
been appointed by President Taft Minister to China, and the temptation to visit them at the
United States Legation in old Peking was too formidable to be resisted.”108 Appointed in
1909, “The new minister and his wife” arrived in the late spring of 1910 and had “little
time to get adjusted” to Beijing before her arrival that fall (having spent the intervening
time at the nearby summer resorts at Beidaihe 北戴河, or “Pei-ta Ho,” which were
favored by the international community); together they “slipped easily into the
cosmopolitan legation life” of state dinners and dancing.109
In A Poet’s Life, Monroe quotes extensively from her impressions of life at that time
in Beijing:
This is the most romantic capital I ever saw. All this eager, active, very concentrated
and intimate legation life, with its theatrical semblance for amplitude and grandeur,
against the hoary background of a life, a race, an architecture older than the whole
Graeco-Roman system we were born into. I doubt if anywhere else in the world is
the contrast quite so rich or the moment quite so dramatic. For things are changing
even here…When girls’ schools are being founded, and Manchu ladies are
accompanying their husbands to foreign dinners, and it is becoming unfashionable
for Chinese women of the upper classes to have bound feet–even railroads and coal
mines are less revolutionary than such new ideas as these.110
As we have already seen in regards to education, Monroe argues that a revolution of ideas
in China outpaces technological progress or political upheaval. All the same, like Pound in
the Oriental Print Room of the British Museum, it was the traditional arts of
108 Ibid., 222.
109 Ibid., 231.
110 Ibid., 233.
58
China–particularly its architecture and visual arts–which first impressed itself upon her. She
took “a sudden very deep plunge into Chinese art,” shepherded in her education by one
“Charles L. Freer, the Detroit collector whose beautiful museum in Washington,
bequeathed to the nation at his death in 1919, perpetuates his fame,” and who was “hot
on the trail” for Chinese paintings and sculptures during her time in the country.111 She
also had occasion to visit local art connoisseurs, like “another great collector, the
ex-Viceroy Tuan Fang” (Duanfang 端方), an educational reformist who instituted
kindergartens and China’s first public library (the Nanjing Library, née Jiangnan Library ).
Among the items in his collection displayed to Monroe were bronzes from Zhou dynasty
temples–which, by the 1930s, she noted were “now in the Metropolitan Museum of New
York”112. Praising qualities which Witter Bynner would later give to Chinese poetry,
Monroe describes “the delicate precision of beauty” and “subtle harmonies in old Chinese
art” as an inspiration “against which much Occidental art becomes blatant and
melodramatic.”113 And she voices especial appreciation for Tiantan 天坛, a religious
complex in the heart of Beijing and “the very flower of Chinese architecture and one of the
masterpieces of the world,” where “in the ultimate center of things, the temple of the
universal God where no picture or sculptured image desecrates its sublimity, one wins
from art a sense of unlimited breadth and spaciousness under the lofty sky of heaven.”114
111 Ibid., 234.
112 Ibid., 235.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid., 236.
59
Leaving Beijing in November 1910, as “the season’s first snowflakes” began to fall,
she stopped off in Shanghai, “that misplaced European capital,” and made social visits to
figures such as “Consul General Wilder,” father of playwright Thornton Wilder.115 By
December she was heading back to the United States via Japan, “an anticlimax after China”:
though she found “the Japanese temples more trimly kept and in better repair,” and
described the Kamakura Buddha (Kamakura Daibutsu 鎌倉大仏) as “the noblest conception
of deified humanity which I have ever seen,” she “missed the colored roofs of the Peking
temples and palaces, and the simpler lines of Northern Chinese architecture.”116 Writing
about her “readjustment” to American life in the Chicago Tribune, Monroe remarks that
Chinese aesthetic sensibilities “bid us pause with arresting power. Something in their quiet
authority allures us; already the art of the West turns to listen and observe; and her
followers must note and obey the change in her mood as she goes on her way.”117
In contrast with Monroe’s recollections in her autobiography, Lucy and William
Calhoun’s papers and first-hand accounts of their time in China are unpublished and
heretofore unexplored in literary scholarship. Though the Calhouns shared more or less the
same experiences in China during William’s appointment, they had vastly different
understandings of the country. According to Mark Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejudice,
bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Dewey likewise had faith in the individual–which is to
say the privileged, educated cosmopolitan–and their ability to overcome learned habits of
115 Ibid., 237.
116 Ibid., 237–38.
117 Ibid., 238–39.
60
thinking and sociopolitical prejudices that remained dominant within the masses at
large.118 In contrast, Sullivan argues in regards to race relations, “it is intimacy and
familiarity, not foreignness, that tends to produce anger and hostility toward others.”119 In
other words, familiarity breeds contempt. Outwardly, Monroe describes Calhoun as
“playing ably his new diplomatic role, and endearing himself to all Peking by his
companionability, his sincerity, his faith in people, his humor and love of life.”120
However, in his private letters a different figure presents itself: writing in December 1911,
one year after Monroe’s visit and in the midst of the Xinhai Revolution (Xinhai geming 辛亥
革命) which inaugurated China’s Republican era (Guomin shiqi 民國時期), Calhoun writes
her a lengthy letter describing the social and political upheaval:
The fear among the foreigners was that the natives–the rival races [Manchu and
Han Chinese]–might begin fighting each other… The stage seemed to be set, with
scenery in place, the actors in the wings waiting for their cue, the orchestra tuning
up and the curtain ready to rise up on a horrible, grewsome [sic] tragedy. For
many days and nights every ear was strained to hear the first sound of the bloody
tocsin. Pleasant anticipations, weren’t they? Charming city, this Peking! Very nice
and interesting people, these Chinese! But nothing happened.
Calhoun follows these sardonic remarks with an account of Yuan Shikai 袁世凯, from
which he then expands into a broad description of the Chinese national character
generally–one quite at odds with Monroe’s own account:
118 John Dewey, Anne S Sharpe, and Carl Cohen, “Racial Prejudice and Friction,” in The Middle Works,
1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 13 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983),
242–54.
119 Shannon Sullivan, “From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting &Quot;Racial
Prejudice"” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 198, doi:10.1353/jsp.2004.0026.
120 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 233.
61
He is not especially intellectual in appearance and he doesn’t look much like a
statesman. For that matter, none of the Chinese do; they are not statesmen, any of
them, in the sense in which we understand the term. The standard for character, for
efficiency, is very low. They have little or no breadth of view, no perception, no
inspiration, no imagination. How can they have? For centuries past they have been
trained to look backward, into the dim shadows of the past, where lie the graves of
their ancestors. They never look forward. The future has no promise, no hope, no
aspiration for them. They never dream dreams or see visions with the ‘faculty
divine’ for the glory of their country.121
Calhoun associates a historical Confucian emphasis on ancestor worship in Chinese culture
with a general tendency of backwardness, yielding a people with “little or no breadth of
view, no perception, no inspiration, no imagination.” His use of the term “imagination”
here operates very much in the same sense as Dewey’s. In this way, it affirms Cornel West’s
claim that, contrary to its intellectual history in the United States, there is nothing inherently
progressive, in and of itself, about pragmatist politics.122 On the one hand, figures such as
Calhoun undercut Dewey’s misplaced faith in an internationally-minded cosmopolitan
class. On the other, Calhoun’s statements reveal habituated racial prejudices which in a
Deweyan sense are not demonstrative of “thinking” at all. Calhoun’s dim outlook is a
continuation of earlier, turn of the century missionary-cum-culture critics such as Arthur
Smith, whose writing on Chinese national character accentuated an essentialized difference
between the United States and China from the standpoint of an assumed western
superiority.123 Rather than Monroe’s advocacy of Chinese civilizational power, the
121 William Calhoun to Harriet Monroe, December 29, 1911, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 1 Folder 3, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
122 Mendieta, Eduardo. “Empire, Pragmatism, and War: A Conversation with Cornel West,” April 6, 2004.
https://www.csub.edu/~mault/west.htm. Indeed, Dewey’s own stance regarding Sino-US relations abetted, if not
condoned the continuation of racial prejudice of white majorities against Asian populations where more
drastic interventionist actions by the government were necessary. See Dewey, Sharpe, and Cohen, “Racial
Prejudice and Friction”.
123 Lydia Liu, “Translating National Character: Lu Xun and Arthur Smith,” in Translingual Practice: Literature,
National Culture, and Translated Modernity 1900-1937 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995).
62
adversarial positions of Smith and Calhoun are better understood by what Lydia Liu
describes as a “clash of empires.”124
Soon after the events of the revolution Calhoun resigned from his position, which
was suddenly more precarious and far less desirable. He and Lucy moved back to Chicago,
where he became a consultant, trading his previous position in for lucrative consulting
contracts for businesses attempting to make in-roads in the Chinese economy. Yet
Monroe’s sister Lucy was considerably more sanguine about China than her husband.
Writing a letter to her brother, Lucy assures him, “Do not worry about us. We are quite
safe and sheltered here and would not have missed the excitemeny [sic], as long as it had
to be, for anything. Poor old China, I am afraid she will have to suffer in the cause of
liberty.125 Undeterred by the winds of change in Asia, she moved back to China after
William’s death in 1916, where she continued to live for the next two decades. In her
unpublished manuscripts, she recounts her fond memories of the country: meeting the
Empress Dowager Cixi, traveling with Florence Ayscough up the Changjiang 长江 River
(conventionally rendered in English as Yang-tze River, based upon the lower Yangzijiang  扬
子江 section) from Shanghai 上海 to Chongqing 重庆, and developing a
connoisseurship of Chinese ”tapestries” and other fine arts. As with Monroe, Lucy’s
narrative reveals class biases and unacknowledged privileges endemic to the city’s
cosmopolitan milieu of Europeans and Euro-Americans. She describes how “the foreigner
124 Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006).
125 “Personal Letter to William Monroe from Lucy Calhoun,” March 4, 1912, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 1,
Folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Perhaps to differentiate the two,
she refers to her brother William as “Billy,” and her husband by his nickname “Cal.”.
63
lives his colorful life undaunted by strange ways and an alien language,” ensconced in “the
luxury of unhurried comfort and loyal service,” while those seeking a “richly
cosmopolitan” experience of China “had a pleasant mixture of Chinese life and a quota of
Chinese friends.” In contrast, she observes that Chinese laboring class “live their lives
uncomplainingly, accepting the world as it is, the good with the bad, the chastisement of
the gods along with their rewards.” At her worse, she slides into patronizing, romantic
stereotypes of the menial Chinese laborer content with their lot in life, “happier than the
white-collar clerk at his desk [who is] dreaming of things he cannot attain.”126
No matter the aspect of China under discussion, tranquility and happiness, belied
by the news abroad of constant war and political turmoil, remains the prevailing themes of
Lucy Calhoun’s writing. Describing Beijing, her home for over twenty years, she calls it
“one of the great cities of the world, asking no quarter, standing in quiet dignity for what
it is, seeking neither blame nor praise.” Likewise, she personifies the Forbidden City
(Gugong 故宫) of the Republican years as “A very human museum, intimate and friendly,
which has grown out of the lives and needs of the rulers of a friendly people.” In contrast
with William’s preoccupation with cultural stereotypes and essentialized racial difference
in the name of political realism, Lucy’s Chinese experiences are dominantly conceived
through aesthetic terms. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her descriptions of
expatriate connoisseurship and the wheeling and dealing of Chinese art collectors, who in
their gallantry and high regard for Americans exemplified her belief in “sympathy between
the races.” She writes:
126 Lucy Calhoun, “‘Untitled [on Peking]’ and ‘My Greatest Adventure Was China’” n.d., Lucy Monroe
Calhoun Papers, Box 7, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
64
The dealers make you welcome and give you tea. They are as interested as you as
your reactions, and if you show taste and discrimination, they will lead you on
through flowery courtyards to other rooms and finer treasures. Their courtesy
summons your own, and you find yourself uttering greetings and farewells
unknown to the shops of other lands. The oftener you return and the longer you
consider an object, the better they like you, and nothing in their manner coerces
you to buy against your will.127
As with Monroe, Lucy’s cosmopolitan life and artistic connoisseurship ran hand in hand.
She observed that the latter often served a central role in the pursuits and social life of the
European and Euro-American expatriates, calling to mind the “patrician orientalism” which
John Kuo Wei Tchen identifies in colonial America. As already seen in Monroe, Lucy, and
William Calhoun’s heterogenous relationships to China, Tchen portrays the generation of
America’s founding fathers as holding conflicted, yet often surprisingly idealized
understandings of Chinese culture. Bolstered by the esteem for China in this period,
“Chinese things and ideas” were collected as a “primarily social,” rather than intellectual
pursuit, with collections of rare Chinese objects and consumer goods serving as markers of
social status and taste.128 Likewise, Lucy reflects, “we were all collectors, some of one thing,
some of another, and there was a friendly rivalry between us.” As is often the case for
collectors, it was the very desire to collect itself from which she derived her greatest
pleasure. She writes, “The joy is in the pursuit, for the longer perfection eludes you, the
more certain you are that it will be found in the end.” Moreover, this state of affairs also
extended to her upper-class Chinese friends, though she relates they were never to be
found “in the fairs and shops where we went,” but were instead “attracted by foreign
127 Ibid.
128 John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xx-xxi.
65
shops which left us indifferent.”129 Just as the activities of Lucy and her cohort in China
were reciprocal to her Chinese friends, so to did Lucy’s connoisseurship of traditional
Chinese fine art mirror Monroe’s pursuit of a venue for poetry which reflected this new
age of technological modernity and transnational exchange. Lucy naturally aided her sister
in her literary endeavor, appearing on Poetry’s masthead as a financial contributor
throughout Monroe’s tenure as managing editor, under the name Mrs. William Calhoun.130
In the final analysis, Lucy Calhoun’s position on China was firmly one of sympathy
and advocacy, seeking to render the nation and its people in explicitly human terms, in
order to “leave one sensitive to the majesty of high endeavor in these millions of lives,
working, hoping, suffering, building a nation.” Given the seemingly endless bounty of
artistic and aesthetic experiences to be found in the efflorescence of China’s interwar
period for the cosmopolitan upper-class, it is perhaps less of a surprise in retrospect that, as
it was for so many Americans of the period, her “greatest adventure was China.” She
129 Ibid.
130 For a discussion of modernist collections, see Anne Pfeifer, To the Collector Belongs the Spoils: Modernism and the Art
of Appropriation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023). In her discussion of the collections and collecting
tendencies of Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and African art scholar Carl Einstein, Anne Pfeifer identifies a
dialectal structure of appropriation, both of destruction–particularly so in regards to the rapacious tendencies
and seized national property of instructions such as the British museum–as well as generative, creative, or
even revolutionary properties. See also Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016). Reed identifies the intersection of appropriation and
queer performativity within communities of queer and homosocial male “bachelor Japanists” in American
modernism. Though it lays beyond the scope of this dissertation, the many gay, lesbian, or “spinster” figures
of transpacific Anglo-American modernism, among which include Witter Bynner, Harold Acton, Amy Lowell,
and Monroe and Lucy Calhoun, are rife for research along similar lines.
66
concludes on a sentiment which echoes the Chinese tradition of shanshui 山水 landscape
painting: “China is so big and so old that one never comes to the end of it.”131
iii. The Open Door Policy
What were the geopolitical circumstances which immediately precipitated William
Calhoun’s appointment in China, and Harriet Monroe and Lucy Calhoun’s interest in
Chinese literary and visual art as a reflection of its civilizational power? America’s
relationship towards China in the first half of the twentieth century can be understood
through two government initiatives: the Open Door policy and the Boxer Indemnity
Scholarship Program. After the anti-colonial Boxer Uprising (Yihetuan yundong 义和团运动)
of 1899-1901 was repelled by the Eight Nation Alliance (Ba guo lianjun 八国联军) of
European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, China’s status as a semi-colonized
(banzhimindi 半殖民地) nation appeared unavoidable, and its long-term prospects for
sovereignty and self-governance were in considerable doubt. In order that the United States
may maintain access within, and indeed further expand into China’s domestic market as
part of its “need and ability to expand ever westward,” as well as shore up economic and
military defenses against Japan in its victory, a policy of the Open Door was eagerly
131 For comparison, see “Xishanwujin 溪山无尽,” “Mountains and Streams without End,” a common title
within Chinese landscape painting. See also Gary Snyder’s book-length poem of roughly the same name:
Mountains and Rivers Without End (New York: Counterpoint, 1996).
67
pursued by American statesmen.132 In Jerry Israel’s Progressivism and the Open Door, an
authoritative history of America’s Open Door policy, he writes: “In one of the rare truly
give-and-take situations between the intellectual and political realms, the H Street world of
Brooks and Henry Adams, John Hay, W.W. Rockhill, and Alfred Thayer Mahan produced
an Open Door policy, a minister, a Secretary of State, and a president to support it, and
fertile minds to give it structure and definition.”133 In interwar American accounts, the
Open Door was characterized as a “square deal.”134 The 1937 newsreel “War in China,”
intending to catch the average American up to their nation’s recent past in the Pacific, tells
it this way: “In return for the special privileges which gave foreign traders access to China’s
markets of 400 million prospective customers, the United States and other world powers
pledged themselves to respect China’s territorial integrity, until her scattered millions,
pursuing their ancient ways, could become a unified country.”135
Yet the blatant hypocrisy of American policies of an open door for economic trade
with China abroad and exclusion of Chinese laboring classes domestically was readily
apparent to all parties involved. Indeed, it was the prevailing instigating factor in the
132 Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905-1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1971), 5.
133 Ibid., 5–6.
134 Ibid., 5.
135 “War in China.” March of Time. New York: HBO, 1937. Alexander Street/ProQuest.
https://video-alexanderstreet-com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/channel/march-of-time-y6. The newsreel tells the story of China
“slowly” coalescing into a technologically and socially modern state, contingent upon the country’s
unification under Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republican government in 1927—until the disruption of China’s “most
dreaded enemy, Japan.” The phrase “400 million prospective customers” invokes Carl Crow’s well-known
400 Million Customers, an account of his time in China as an newspaper editor and businessman published in
1937. Numerous editions of Crow’s book were subsequently released, including an Armed Services Edition
during World War II. See Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers (1937; repr., Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis,
2012).
68
Chinese Boycott of 1905, a year-long boycott of American goods both within mainland
China and across the wider Sinosphere. Despite this, according to one scholar, the
perceived economic benefits of the Open Door policy for both nations were such that this
disparity was largely left unchallenged:
Business interests and missionaries rightly pointed out the incongruity of having an
open door for trade in China and a closed door for immigrants in the United States,
but the confrontation between the two policies in 1900-1906 was more theoretical
than real. Both the Peking and Washington governments knew full well that the
open door for trade was much in China’s interest no matter how badly Chinese
might be treated in the United States.136
America’s political and economic relationship to China from 1905 to the outbreak of the
Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 was predicated on a paternalistic belief in America’s
socioeconomic dominance and western cultural superiority. Yet it was the soft power of
the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program which best reflects Harold Isaac’s description of
this period as America’s “Age of Benevolence” towards China.137 Weili Ye observes that
the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program embodies the “paradoxical roles” which the
West held for the Chinese intellectual class as “both the oppression of imperialism and the
lure of modernity.”138 Already financially strained from internal civil unrest, China owed
financial indemnities to the United States government as part of the 1901 Boxer Protocols,
the latest in a long line of unequal treaties between China and foreign powers during its
long century of “national humiliation (guo chi 国耻).” By converting these indemnities
into a scholarship fund for talented Chinese students to study abroad and acquire a modern
136 Esthus, Raymond A, “Review of Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door Policy, 1900–1906: Clashes
Over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era, by Delber L. McKee,” Journal of American History 64, no. 4 (March 1978):
1144–45, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890810.
137 Harold R Isaacs, Scratches on our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 71.
138 Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name, 11.
69
western education, the United States transformed its status on the world stage from that of
rapacious belligerent to a pillar of enlightened liberalism; moreover, according to Ye,
The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was the most important scheme for
educating Chinese students in America and arguably the most consequential and
successful in the entire foreign-study movement of twentieth-century China. It
enjoyed a good reputation because of its competitive selection procedure and high
academic standard, especially after the founding of a specially designed preparatory
school in Beijing, Qinghua (Tsing-hua) College. From the approximately thirteen
hundred individuals sent by the program from 1909 to 1929, there emerged some
of modern China’s best scholars and educators, as well as prominent leaders in
other walks of life.139
The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program enshrined the broader legal right of Chinese
students to study abroad in the United States, whether it be through the auspices of
government programs, missionary funding, or private family wealth and resources: “As
upper-class Chinese, they were exempted, like merchants and diplomats, from the
exclusion acts and were granted legal protection by the American government.” Moreover,
Ye assesses that “as an intellectual elite seeking western learning, they were in general
kindly received by educated Americans”–even as they found themselves thrust into the
“peculiar and precarious racial situation” of prevailing anti-Chinese sentiment within the
broader public.140 Ye highlights how American race relations imposed a race and
class-consciousness among Chinese scholars who would otherwise “have little to do with
their lower-class compatriots except to act like masters commanding the latter’s service. In
the United States, the ‘masters’ found out that, like it or not, they were bound to the
‘servants’ by common racial and national identity.”141 Moreover, though Chinese scholars
139 Ibid., 10.
140 Ibid., 82–83.
141 Ibid., 83.
70
were allowed entry into the United States, their status did not inure them from the
appalling conditions of in-transit detainment by American immigration officers, or
subsequent scrutiny of state officials during their years of study.142 He elaborates:
Issues of race, class, and modernity were all implicated in the students’ ambivalent
relationship with the Chinese laborers in the United States. Some students blamed
the lower-class Chinese and their traditional way of life for the poor image of China
held by the American public, and strove themselves to project a new and
westernized image. Being the Other to the laborers in terms of class and modernity,
the students nonetheless found themselves inseparable from the lower-class
immigrants around the issue of race. And race mattered in America.143
Though early waves of Chinese students in the United States sought technical or
professional education in areas such as the sciences, engineering, or law, by the late 1910s
significant numbers of Chinese students began to be involved in the humanities, either
during their time abroad or upon their subsequent return to China. Given this, an
important question should now be raised: to what extant did Monroe’s relationship to
China inform her later domestic literary activities in the United States? According to
Monroe herself in one interview, her “birth of an idea” for Poetry was inspired by her
awareness of poetry’s enduring high esteem and cultural capital in China. But did this
transformational experience lead to the inclusion and participation of Sino-US poets and
scholars in Poetry itself, or were they excluded in favor of Euro-Americans writing in an
“oriental manner”–a mode which prevailed in American modernist poetry during Poetry’s
first decades? For that matter, were there in fact Chinese poets and scholars writing in
English at all in this period?
142 Ibid., 88-89. Indeed, Ye argues that the 1905 boycott served “in part as a protest against the mistreatment
of the upper-class Chinese in America.” (ibid., 89)
143 Ibid., 83.
71
One anthology of Asian American poetry provides us with insights into the
complexities of these questions: Juliana Chang’s Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian
American Poetry 1892-1970, published under the aegis of the Asian American Writers’
Workshop with a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Of the
twenty-seven poets represented in the anthology, Chang identifies the following poets
from the early and interwar modernist periods within a broadly conceived Asian American
rubric: Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi (born Noguchi Yonejiro 野口 米次郎), Jun
Fujita, Wen I-to (hereafter Wen Yiduo 闻一多), Masao Handa (Handa Masao 半田正夫),
H.T. Tsiang (Jiang Xizeng 蒋希曾), Bunichi Kagawa, and Moon Kwan (Guan Wenqing
[Mandarin] / Gwaan Manching [Cantonese] 关文清).144
The inclusion of Wen, and his poem “The Laundry Song,” is particularly
revealing.145 No explanatory or paratextual information appears alongside the poem, and
the reader could be forgiven if they were to assume that it was written in English. In fact,
the poem is Kai-Yu Hsu’s 1963 translation of Wen’s “Xiyi ge 洗衣歌.”146 The source of the
translation, Hsu’s Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry, appears in Quiet Fire’s back matter under
“Copyrights and Acknowledgments”–though here the citation neither lists Hsu as editor
144 Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry 1892-1970 (New York City: The Asian American
Writers’ Workshop, 1996). Chang’s collection stands apart from nearly all other anthologies of Asian
American literature to date in its broad inclusion of English poetry predating the Asian American movement,
as well as its capacious employment of the term “Asian American” in regards to transnational figures such as
Noguchi, Wen, and Kwan.
145 Ibid., 26–27.
146 Kai-Yu Hsu, ed., Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1963), 51. Hsu
received his B.A. in foreign languages and literature at Tsinghua University (Qinghua Daxue 清华大学) in
China, his M.A. in journalism at the University of Oregon, and his Ph.D in modern Chinese literature and
thought at Stanford University.
72
nor translator. (Interestingly, Hsu is cited by name in the “Bibliography” section, but in
this case for his 1972 publication Asian-American Authors.)
In the early 1920s, Wen studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he crossed
paths with Monroe and Amy Lowell.147 Moreover, he cultivated a life-long interest in 19th
century Romanticism–Hsu argues that “The Laundry Song” imitates Thomas Hood’s 1843
poem, “The Song of the Shirt.”148 “The Laundry Song” first appears in 1925, roughly the
same time as Wen’s return to China in 1925, where he participated in the Crescent Moon
literary society (Xinyue She 新月社) alongside other western-educated figures like Hu Shi
and Xu Zhimo 徐志摩.149
Wen’s original prefatory note to the poem, omitted in Quiet Fire, makes it plain that
the poem is written for a mainland Chinese audience, with its subject matter instigated by
his overseas experiences:
Washing is the most common occupation of overseas Chinese. So it is that
international students are often asked, “Is your father a laundryman?” Many must
suffer this indignity. However, washing as an occupation indeed contains a
meaning which is a little mysterious–or at least I thought so–and so I wrote “The
Laundry Song.”
洗衣是美国华侨最普通的职业。因此留学生常常被人问道：“你的爸爸是洗衣
裳的吗？”许多人忍受不了这侮辱，然而洗衣的职业确乎含着一点神秘的意
义，至少我曾经这样的想过，作洗衣歌; translation mine150
147 Ibid., 44.
148 Ibid.
149 For a discussion of China’s modernist literary societies and journals, see Michael Hockx, Questions of Style:
Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003).
150 Yiduo Wen, Wen Yiduo Shi Wenji 闻一多诗文集 (Beijing, China: Wanjuan chuban gongsi 万卷出版公司,
2014), 83, https://baike.baidu.com/item/洗衣歌/2890831.
73
A poem published in China, for a Chinese-speaking audience, which follows the form of a
nineteenth-century English poem and seeks to give voice to marginalized Chinese
American laborers, “The Laundry Song” is emblematic of the transnational exchange of
early East Asian and Asian American poetry. It also attests to the porousness of the concept
of Asian American itself before its later establishment as a de jure identity category. Chang is
remarkably inclusive in Quiet Fire regarding this latter point: Hartmann, Noguchi, and Kwan
all appear in her anthology alongside Wen, troubling easy distinctions between the
transnational and the diasporic subject, or that of Asian American and East Asian.151
The inclusion of Wen’s Chinese verse passed off in English-language clothing bears
a metonymic relationship to the tendency to conceptualize early Chinese American
literature as literature in languages other than English. Anonymous Sinophone writings
such as the Cantonese Gold Mountain Songs (Gumsan gozaap 金山歌集) and tibishi 题壁诗
poetry on the walls of the Angel Island barracks attest to the status of poetry as an enduring
cultural force among Chinese American communities, largely characterized as
uneducated.152 Quite Fire includes representative examples from both. As with “The Laundry
Song,” these poems give voice to a Chinese underclass which did not so much fall on the
deaf ears of English-speakers as pass by them, both imperceptible and in plain sight.
151 In contrast, Weili Ye observes a persistent misconception among overseas Chinese students that American
Chinese were mostly laundry workers, attesting to “a tendency among some students to emphasize their class
status so as to differentiate themselves from the resident Chinese,” along with a repetition of American
cultural stereotypes as credible received wisdom; see Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name, 94-104, passim.
152 Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Oakland, CA: University of
California Press, 1987); Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel
Island, 1910-1940 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014). Yunte Huang reads the citational
nature of many of these poems, which allude to other the canon of classical Chinese poetry, as indicative of
the high level of education and aesthetic refinement of those interned; see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations:
History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 101-115.
74
Steven Yao argues that “the enduring influence of an activist ethos” within Asian
American studies situates the study of poetry in a “curiously bifurcated space”: on the one
hand, it is connected to elitism; on the other, it denotes a populist realism of ordinary
language, lived experience, and protest.153 Texts within Asian American studies like Quiet
Firehave often historically invoked a condition of quietness, silence, or voicelessness, often
in recognition of the systemic conditions of Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, and
marginalization of Asians within the broader American social polity and cultural sphere.
Scholars have observed how this silencing operates in dialectic relation to the historical
prevalence of Euro-American appropriation and construction of broadly “Asiatic” motifs,
or have read Asian American literature as a counter-discourse which resists and speaks back
to this silence.154
Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences exemplifies this latter point.155 Yu’s sardonic poems
have been read as a wholesale polemic against modernist and contemporary poetry’s
engagement with Asia from an explicitly Asian Americanist perspective: figures such as
Pound and Snyder come under particular attack, while Weinberger finds himself hoisted by
his own petard. As John Yau blurbs, “Not only does Yu make Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder
stand on their pointy heads in ways that are illuminating and funny, but he also skewers
Jeb Bush, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Marianne Moore, and Eliot Weinberger right through
153 Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity, Global Asias (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.
154 See, for example, King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); see also Elda Tsou, Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).
155 Timothy Yu, 100 Chinese Silences (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2016).
75
their bright yellow Chinese hearts.”156 In the light of such perspectives, Lucas Klein
observes an “anxiety” surrounding East Asian translation which has emerged in our present
moment.157
And yet–couldn’t it also be said that there is something in the nature of Yu’s
critique which is by its very nature quintessentially modernist? Notably, 100 Chinese Silences is
published by Les Figues Press, an explicitly avant-garde small press which, according to its
founders, “resists basic market-driven standards of quality, morality and political identity
found in the tried and untrue sectors of mainstream publishing and the current
après-garde.”158 As will be discussed in chapter two, interwar modernism was rife with
skirmishes over Chinese translation–a condition later echoed in Weinberger’s 19 Ways of
Looking At Wang Wei.159 In this way, the critique of modernism’s engagement with China,
and East Asia generally, is revealed to not be a recent phenomenon of our contemporary
age but as inherent to and as old as that engagement itself–even as the respective terms of
that engagement and critique have changed over the intervening century.
In Apparitions of Asia, Josephine Park conceives of Anglo-American modernist poetry
writ large as an Orientalist project, resulting in a vexed heritage that Asian American poets
156 “100 Chinese Silences,” Small Press Distribution, 2023,
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781934254615/100-chinese-silences.aspx.
157 Lucas Klein, “Silences, Whispers, and the Figure of China,” Genre 51, no. 3 (December 1, 2018): 267–93,
doi:10.1215/00166928-7190519.
158 American Book Review 31, no. 4 (May/June 2010): 9.
159 Wei Wang, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Mount
Kisco, N.Y: Moyer Bell, 1987).
76
must invariably confront, if not overcome.160 Like Yu, Park reads modernist and Asian
American poetry as deeply imbricated, with the latter (Asian American poetry) emerging
from out of the former (Anglo-American modernism) in the second half of the twentieth
century. However, such a bifurcated chronology leads the reader to believe that poets of
East Asian heritage simply were not present or participatory in the early and interwar
modernist periods. A similar chronology is indicated in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading
Asian American Literature, and the monographs’ subtitle, From Necessity to Extravagance. It posits
that Asian American poetry developed from the “necessity” of enunciating a politically
activated subject position, while belles-lettres experimentation and “extravagance”
characteristic of American modernism only emerged later in Asian American literature,
towards the end of the twentieth-century.161
Reductively, there are two conclusions one can arrive at: either Asian American
poets did not historically intersect with American modernism–or, if they did, what they
wrote cannot properly be called Asian American poetry. These conclusions are then
extrapolated, totum pro parte, into assumptions that the structural racism enshrined in the
American legal system was also uniformly reflected by explicitly racist attitudes towards
Asians held among American modernists, without proper attention to the complexities of
the “peculiar and precarious racial situation” of the early and interwar period. This error is
epitomized by R. John Williams’ claim that “[American modernists] were closing their
eyes to the literal incarceration and forced exclusion of Chinese bodies,” turning to “the
160 Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
161 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993); despite his interrogation of conventionally received narratives surrounding Asian
American poetry, Yao likewise describes racial protest as “The first to emerge in the history of Asian
American poetic production.” Yao, Foreign Accents, 12.
77
linguistic and cultural ‘other’ of China, without regard for the contemporary ‘other’
immediately present.”162 Not only were Sino-US poets and scholars coeval with American
modernism, but they were present in its development and published in American
modernist magazines, with Poetry during Monroe’s editorialship serving as perhaps the most
significant example.163
On the website for the Poetry Foundation, the Chicago non-profit which operates
Poetry, there appears an introductory article titled, “A History of the Magazine.” It begins,
“Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to
verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s Open Door policy, set forth in volume 1 of
the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best
contemporary poetry, of any style, genre, or approach.”164 Despite the Poetry Foundation
itself identifying the prevailing editorial policy for the magazine under Monroe as an
“Open Door policy,” this has never been brought into conversation with the
contemporaneous Open Door policy of the United States in China. In the November 1912
number, Monroe concludes the reviews and editorials section with a statement on “The
Open Door.”165 In it, she addresses the reactionary “fears” expressed to her that Poetry’s
162 R. John Williams, “Decolonizing Cathay: Teaching the Scandals of Translation Through Angel Island
Poetry,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2006–Winter 2007): 24.
Williams errs in hastily generalizing attitudes held by Ezra Pound–the complexities of which will explored at
length in chapter three–into larger epistemic claims concerning American modernists.
163 I employ the term “Sino-US” to broadly identify poets and scholars of Chinese heritage who wrote in
English in the United States before the establishment of “Asian American” as a legal category. In doing so, I
follow Nan Da, who uses this term in regards to interactions between Chinese and American writers, scholars,
and officials in the nineteenth century. See Nan Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
164 “A History of the Magazine,” Poetry Foundation, 2023, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/history.
165 Harriet Monroe, “The Open Door,” Poetry 1, no. 2 (1912): 62–64.
78
interest in publishing modernist verse (what she would later name, in a 1921 anthology,
The New Poetry166) would render Poetry a marginal venue within the publishing world, “a
house of refuge for minor poets.”167
Her response focuses on two points. First, she observes, “The world which laughs
at the experimenter in verse, walks negligently through our streets, and goes seriously,
even reverently, to the annual exhibitions in our cities, examining hundreds of pictures
and statues without expecting even the prize-winners to be masterpieces.”168 A
reoccurring theme for Monroe in the first decade of the magazine, her comparison seeks to
place modernist verse on equal cultural and economic footing as the fine art “bought at
high prices by public museums,” regardless of their questionable status as timeless
masterpieces.169 In this way, her riposte is a continuation of Poetry’s maxim, “To have great
poets, there must be great audiences,” given that a primary marker of a healthy and robust
audience for an art form is a widespread appreciation for it in all of its varieties, and at all
levels of professional quality. Towards her second point, she reaffirms the magazine’s
commitment to an explicitly pluralist aesthetic policy:
The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine–may the great poet we are
looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end
the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school.
166 Harriet Monroe, ed., The New Poetry (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1917),
https://www.bartleby.com/265/index1.html.
167 Monroe, “The Open Door,” 62.
168 Ibid., 63.
169 Ibid.
79
They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless
of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.170
To be sure, Monroe’s editorialship of Poetry in its first decade showed considerable
preferential treatment to friends and family, to an extent perhaps unremarkable in her own
day, but downright blatant and objectionable to our modern day sensibilities.171 Moreover,
Monroe articulates Poetry’s Open Door policy in explicitly aesthetic terms–the “desire to
print the best English verse which is being written today”–rather than corollaries in our
present day such as color-blind casting, which explicitly link democratic inclusivity to
broader structural reform and sociocultural equity. Nonetheless, the magazine’s ostensible
aesthetic and political nonpartisanship and Monroe’s unacknowledged liberal
progressivism often worked in tandem. The magazine’s John Reed Prize, for example, was
endowed by the family of the well-known leftist journalist (and former Poetry contributor)
after his death in 1920–yet the prize was stipulated merely to go to a young poet of merit
and promise. Indeed, John Reed’s own publications in Poetry bore a surprising apolitical
bent–all the more striking for a man who inspired communist party clubs in the 1930s to
name themselves after him and take up the motto, “Art is a weapon in the class struggle.”
Consequently, when the second annual John Reed Prize went to Harlem Renaissance poet
Countee Cullen, the social significance of a major poetry award reaching across the color
line went unmentioned by Poetry editorial.
170 Ibid., 64.
171 To name one example, the 1917 Helen Haire Levinson Prize award was given to “Grotesques” by Cloyd
Head, future husband of associate editor Eunice Tietjens (Harriet Monroe, ed., Poetry 29, no. 2 (November
1926): 106). In contrast, controversies around poetry contests with entrance in the mid-2000s led to
sweeping institutional rule changes concerning submission eligibility. See, for example, Kevin Lardner, “The
Contestor: Series Editor Retires Amid Controversy,” Poets & Writers, November/December 2005,
https://www.pw.org/content/contester_series_editor_retires_amid_controversy.
80
Indeed, while America’s Open Door policy enabled free market trade abroad and
Asian exclusion domestically, Poetry’s Open Door policy was far more heterogenous and
bi-directional. Of the poets anthologized in Quiet Fire before World War II, Noguchi, Fujita,
Kagawa, and Kwan all published in Poetry; Hartmann, meanwhile, appeared in the
magazine’s essays and announcements. Moreover, poets and scholars of the interwar era not
included in Quiet Fire, such as Sun Yu 孙瑜, Jiang Kanghu 江抗虎, Chen Shixiang 陈世骧,
and Kwei Chen (characters unknown) also published in Poetry, as did the Filipino poet and
novelist Carlos Bulosan. Additionally, Cai Tinggan 蔡廷干’s translations were reviewed by
Tietjens. The magazine also took note of the death of Wen Yiduo’s Crescent Moon
compatriot Xu Zhimo 徐志摩.172 Translations of Xu’s poems later appeared in the
magazine’s 1935 “Chinese Number,” and in the same number were discussed alongside
Hu Shi in Harold Acton’s essay on contemporary Chinese poetry. In short, the extent of my
research reveals H.T. Tsiang as the only significant Sino-US poet of this period who does not
appear in one form or another in Poetry. Rather than exclusion, Poetry’s relationship to
Sino-US figures of the interwar era was marked by what Ellen Wu and Madeline Hsu call
“conditional inclusion,” whereby “Select categories of Asians gained authorized entry into
the United States and mainstream acceptability by virtue of demonstrating high levels of
education, economic attainment, and cultural compatibility.”173 Ellen Wu and Madeline
Hsu use this term in relation to the emergence of liberal (rather than progressive) racial
reform in the United States against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics after World War
II; however, by “placing a global lens on U.S. immigration and ethnic history” which
172 Poetry 40, no. 3 (1932): 176.
173 Madeline Hsu and Ellen Wu, “’Smoke and Mirrors’: Conditional Inclusion, Model Minorities, and the
Pre-1965 Dismantling of Asian Exclusion,” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 45.
81
“troubles the standard historiographical time line,” the framework also aptly describes
Chinese writers and scholars within American modernism.
Sun Yu and Moon Kwan serve as apt examples in this regard. In 1925, as an
undergraduate at University of Wisconsin, Sun completed a thesis on Asian influences in
American modernist poetry–a surprisingly early example for this kind of research to be
undertaken at the collegiate level. The following year, his translations of the Tang poet Li
Bai 李白 appeared in Poetry .174 Kwan had also placed translations of Li Bai and Wang Wei
王维 in Poetry a few years earlier, appearing in the same number as Japanese tanka 短歌
poems by the Chicago-based Japanese photographer and poet Jun Fujita.175 Before that, he
published a portfolio of Wang Wei translations in The Liberator in collaboration with Max
Eastman.176 Though modernists in both China and the United States sought to free
themselves of stagnation in their respective national verse cultures, classical Chinese verse
itself functioned for these poets as a way to “pass” within the Euro-American identity
poetics of American modernism.
Yet these publications, critical to locating Sun and Kwan in the historical record of
American modernist poetry, only begin to scratch the surface. In northern California, Kwan
ensconced himself in the west-coast bohemian scenes of the 1910s and 1920s, a self-styled
Chinese literati of antiquity running in the same crowds as modernist American painters,
174 Poetry 28, no. 5 (1926): 256–57.
175 Poetry 18, no. 3 (1921): 130, 128-129. Fujita is credited by some with bringing the form into American
modernist poetry, with the shorter haiku form respectively attributed to either Noguchi or Hartmann
176 Wei Wang, “Poems of Wang Wei,” trans. Max Eastman and Moon Kwan, The Liberator 3, no. 11
(November 1920).
82
poets, and silent film actors.177 For example, in 1918 Moon Kwan sat for a series of
portraits by Margrethe Mather, a modernist photographer romantically associated with
Edward Weston. In one photograph, where Mather experiments with compositional
framing, he appears in the bottom right of the image wearing tangzhuang clothing and a
guapimao 瓜皮帽 hat; meanwhile, in the upper left a scroll depicting Li Bai looms over him.
The figurative association which the photograph establishes between the Tang poet and
Moon Kwan is unmistakable–made all the more so by Mather herself referring to her
subject as a poet.178 This aspect of Moon Kwan’s artistic persona is made manifest in his
1920 collection A Pagoda of Jewels–the earliest identified book of American poetry written in
English by a poet of Chinese descent.179 In his poem “To Witter Bynner,” commemorating
Bynner’s presence at Berkeley and his establishment of the Halcyon poetry society in which
Kwan participated alongside Genevieve Taggard, Stella Benson, and Chinese scholar and
poet Jiang Kanghu, Kwan writes:
177 Literary bohemianism took note of the presence of Asian immigration and culture in the United States
quite early. Bret Harte, a primary purveyor of bohemianism in the American west in the nineteenth, was also
the writer of the notorious poem “Plain Talk from Truthful James,” better known by the name “The Heathen
Chinee.” Yet in the interwar period Kwan found himself on equal footing among the bohemian set in a way
unforeseen by earlier generations, attesting to the ways in which the circulation of Chinese civilizational
power disrupted the Eurocentrism of dominant American culture within interwar artistic communities. For a
discussion of Harte’s pivotal role in extending American bohemianism from a relatively self-contained group
of New York City journalists and transplanting it in Northern California, see Joanna Levin, Bohemia inAmerica,
1858-1920 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 70-125.
178 Beth Gates Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (Los Angeles:
Getty, 2011), 145-146. I thank Jing Yu for confirming my suspicions that this figure is Li Bai, and
identifying the jiuding 酒精 traditional drinking vessel within the scroll’s compositional space (alcohol and
the “banished immortal” Daoist poet being inimically linked). Another, more conventional portrait of Kwan
taken by Mather is housed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. (Margrethe Mather, Moon Kwan,
1918, National Portrait Gallery, https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2011.21)
179 A Jade Pagoda is listed among the “Books Received” in the backmatter of Poetry’s September 1920 number
(“Books Received,” Poetry 16, no. 6 (1920), 350).
83
I, a wanderer; thou a weaver of the petal-speech,
In the bridge-land of the East and West have met.
Though flowers may bloom and fall,
The Spring breeze shall not forget.180
Kwan’s traditional diction and rhyming quatrain form here draws parallels to modernist
women poets such as Sara Teasdale, whose contributions to modernism did not lay in free
verse innovation, but instead in the expansion of English verse to include new voices and
subjectivities–across gender lines for the modernist women poets, and racial lines for Kwan
and the Sino-US poets, respectively. The poem also bears a striking resemblance to
Bynner’s own verse.181 And yet “To Witter Bynner”–a panegyric to a close acquaintance of
Monroe and Tietjens, and himself a frequent contributor to Poetry–never appeared in the
magazine. Nor did any example of Kwan’s original verse. As such, Kwan’s poetry, which
could otherwise be read metonymically in light of Poetry’s Open Door policy–a
“bridge-land of the East and West” where poets from both poles can meet and have
profitable commerce–was excluded from the magazine proper. In this way, the pervasive
interest in East Asia among Euro-American modernist poets, and Monroe in particular,
indeed laid the groundwork for Poetry to open its doors to Sino-US poets; yet their
conditional inclusion rarely extended to publication of original work. Instead, their
inclusion was generally restricted to translations–and of those, by and large, the classical
Tang dynasty poets such as Li Bai who so enamored the interwar modernists. (Indeed, later
180 See Juliana Chang, Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry 1892-1970 (New York: The Asian
American Writers’ Workshop, 1996), 44. Dorothy Wang cites “To Witter Bynner,” first appearing in the
festschrift W.B. InCalifornia in 1918, as the earliest Chinese American poem in English; however, an original
poem by Jiang also appears in the collection, suggesting the title should be shared between them (Dorothy
Wang, “Asian American Poetry and the Politics of Form,” in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, ed.
Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 437–53; Witter
Bynner, W.B. In California: A Tribute (Berkeley, CA: Privately printed, 1919)).
181 For example, compare to “A Caravan from China,” the final poem in Bynner’s 1925 collection Caravan,
which evokes an imagined trip back to the west via the historical silk road: “I went away a western man / But
I am coming back in a caravan, // Coming with wisdom in my hands / Slowly, slowly over the sands.”
(Witter Bynner, Caravan (New York, NY: Knopf, 1925), 77)
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translations of modernist Chinese poets by Acton and Chen in the 1935 “Chinese Number”
compound this state of affairs, even as they refute assumptions that Anglo-American
modernist poets were completely ignorant of a continental Chinese modernism. In this
way, despite Monroe’s own stated aspirations, the magazine’s “open door” indeed
remained “half-shut,” serving as a temporal gatekeeper for those like Kwan who would
seek to contribute their own English verse to American modernism.
This is not the end of the story, however. In an unpublished 1919 letter written to
Monroe from Los Angeles, Kwan relates some brief biographical details along with his
other artistic endeavors:
I was born about twenty three years ago in a little village beyond Canton in South
China and came to America as a student when I was sixteen. I have lived in Los
Angeles now for three years where I have made my living in various ways
including the “movies.” I began to write for the Los Angeles Sunday Times eight
months ago, and they have published ten articles, among them one on Chinese
Poetry. I am now working on translations.
I send a plum-blossom (first, last, and very beautiful) wish to you and “Poetry.”182
In the same period that Kwan was sending translations to Poetry and being photographed as
a “poet” by Mather, he was nearly simultaneously working as a technical assistant in Los
Angeles to D.W. Griffith on the set of the 1919 film Broken Blossoms. During this time he
stayed at the Garnier building, the current site of the Los Angeles Chinese American
Museum and “the oldest and most important single structure linking the [contemporary]
Chinese community to Los Angeles’ original Chinatown.”183 Though the majority of
182 Moon Kwan, to Harriet Monroe, May 2, 1919, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 43 Folder 24, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Kwan’s translations were published two years
later in Poetry’s June 1921 number. His contributor notes in the number are very brief–in keeping with the
standard practice of the magazine at the time–and omits any reference to his work in “the movies,” burying
the authoritative link for American scholars between Moon Kwan the poet and Moon Kwan the filmmaker in
the archival record.
183 “The Building,” Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles, 2023, http://camla.org/the-building/.
85
Chinese students in the United States came from northern and eastern China, Kwan was
born in Guangdong and spoke Cantonese, enabling him to communicate to the film’s
Chinese extras. Whereas Kwan positioned himself in relation to signifiers of classical
Chinese tradition in his endeavors within poetry and fine art, he went to great lengths in
Griffith’s production to advocate for the modernity of the Chinese people. He persuaded
Griffith against the Chinese protagonist of the film wearing a queue, arguing it would be
woefully anachronistic for a narrative taking place in the current day.184
This experience, in all of its dimensions, would prove formative for Kwan. After
obtaining his degree in English at Berkeley he spent the next fifteen years shuttling between
the United States and China, helping to lay the infrastructure for China’s nascent film
industry while also contributing to the odd Hollywood production and screening Chinese
films in the United States. During his time stateside he crossed paths with pioneer Asian
Americans in Hollywood such as Anna May Wong and cinematographer James Wong
Howe, and formed an enduring friendship with prolific journalist and Hollywood
screenwriter Ben Hecht.185 Though he never acquired US citizenship, even after the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made naturalization possible for Asian Americans,
184 Qian Zhang, “From Hollywood to Shanghai: American Silent Films in China” (PhD dissertation,
University of Pittsburgh, 2009), 176–77.
185 For scholarship of Hollywood’s Asian American community in the interwar period–which overlaps with
the silent film era, early sound film, and Hollywood’s “golden age”–see Arthur Dong, Hollywood Chinese (Angel
City Press, 2019). See also, for example, Katie Gee Salisbury, “Young Hollywood Was Asian,” Medium, May 3,
2022, https://katiegeesalisbury.medium.com/young-hollywood-was-asian-aa5e8da6e5c8. For Hecht’s reminiscences on
Kwan, see Florice Whyte Kovan, Rediscovering Ben Hecht: Selling the Celluloid Serpent (Washington, DC: Snickersnee
Press, 1999). The intersections of Asian American actors and filmmakers within American modernism
generally is an area which demands further critical attention. For example, Anna May Wong was close friends
with Carl Van Vechten, the writer and photographer who played a pivotal yet vexatious role in exposing the
Harlem Renaissance to the broader Euro-American public. For an extensive discussion of Anna May Wong
and Carl Van Vechten’s friendship, see Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to
Hollywood Legend (Hong Kong, HONG KONG: Hong Kong University Press, 2012). For profiles of Anna May
Wong among continental modernists such as Walter Benjamin, see Shirley Lim, Performing the Modern
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2019).
86
his continued transpacific movement between Hong Kong and the United States very much
fits the social dynamics of what Aihwa Ong describes as “flexible citizenship.”186 Despite
this, according to Kwan himself, he “decided to return to China after his humiliating
experience at a party in Hollywood in the early 1920s.”187 Unable to break past the
“bamboo” ceiling of the interwar American literary sphere, and with only intermittent
opportunities prospects within Hollywood’s oppressive social climate, his attentions turned
toward film making in Cantonese.188 In the 1930s he co-founded Grandview Film Studio
(Daguan pianchang 大观片场) with Joseph Sunn (Joseph Sunn Jue / Chiu Shu-San
[Cantonese] 赵树燊) as the first Cantonese studio which followed the Hollywood
production model. Together they pioneered early Cantonese sound and color film for the
Hong Kong and overseas American Chinese markets, and released over fifty films over the
next two decades–nearly all lost today.189 Notable examples from these films include the
1935 commercial hit Lifeline (Shengmingxian [Mandarin] / Sangmingsin [Cantonese] ⽣命
线) and the 1941 Golden Gate Girls (Jinmen nü [M] / Gam mun neoi [C] 金门女)–the latter
written, edited, and co-directed by Moon Kwan alongside pioneering female director
186 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999).
187 Quoted in Zhang, “From Hollywood to Shanghai: American Silent Films in China,” 257.
188 Along with what has been previously discussed, Kwan published an account of Chinese prosody in the Los
Angeles Sunday Times, based upon traditional Chinese understandings. Published roughly at the same time as Ezra
Pound’s edition of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, it attracted little to no
notice within the American modernist community.
189 See Kar Law and Frank Bren, Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View (Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Press, 2004).
87
Esther Eng (Ng Gamhaa [C] 五锦霞), with Moon Kwan appearing for good measure in a
cameo role (along with a three-month old Bruce Lee in his first cinematic appearance).190
We return now to our other Sino-US figure, Sun Yu. If he is given short shrift in
our discussion here, it is so only because he is a figure within Chinese film history
significantly more researched and widely known than Kwan. After obtaining a degree in
English at University of Wisconsin and doing graduate work in film at Columbia in the
1920s, Sun became a director at Lianhua Films (Lianhua Yingye 联华影业), a significant
production studio of popular left-wing cinema in 1930s Shanghai. Applying American
directing techniques to the social problems and national ideals of Chinese modernity, Sun
directed films such as Toys (Xiao wanyi 小玩意) in 1933, a melodrama starring Li Lili 黎莉
莉 and Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉–two of the biggest, if not thebiggest screen actresses of the
time–and The Big Road (Dalu 大路) in 1934, a social realist film which romanticizes China’s
laboring class.191 In contrast with Kwan’s countless lost Cantonese films–reflective of the
lack of preservation of early Sinophone film history generally–much of Sun’s filmography,
directed towards a Mandarin audience, remains extant today. According to one scholar,
Sun’s social realism radically departs, technically and aesthetically, from the static blocking
and camera shots of earlier Chinese film. In so doing, “‘the poet of the silver screen’
rejected western and Japanese imperialism while appropriating western democratic ideals,
190 See Golden Gate Girls (Women Make Movies, 2014). Law argues that Eng’s work on the film is omitted in
later accounts, and that Kwan took “the entire credit” for the film in his memoirs (Law and Bren, Hong Kong
Cinema, 98).
191 Toward this point, Stanley Kwan’s 1991 film Center Stage remains the only biopic of a Chinese actress from
this period. The Chinese name for the film is, simply, Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉.
88
romantic momentum, a fascination with science and social progress, and representational
techniques.”192
If by now we have moved well afield of our original discussion of Poetry and Harriet
Monroe, it is only so because of the ways in which the conditional inclusion of Poetry’s
Open Door policy also opens doors for scholars to the rich intermedial and transnational
connections which lay at the heart of American and Chinese modernity–yet are rarely
discussed or perceived as such due to the ways in which these historical and material
linkages operate within the disciplinary gaps of Anglo-American modernist studies, Asian
American studies, East Asian studies, and American and Chinese film studies. Indeed, one
cannot even neatly periodize the artistic production of Kwan and Sun into, for example,
their early literary work in English poetry and their more artistically mature work in
Chinese film. Both sustained their interests in English poetry and translation throughout
their professional lives. In 1932, a decade after his translations in Poetry, Kwan published A
Chinese Mirror: Poems and Plays, a revision and expansion of Pagoda of Jewels.193 This second
collection would see reprintings as late as 1971–this last time in Hong Kong. Meanwhile,
for his part, Sun published Li Po: A New Translation in 1982, well into retirement. Belying the
collection’s subtitle, it includes his translations of Li Bai which first appeared in Poetry over a
half century earlier.194 As such, in the final analysis we can identify Kwan, Sun, and
interwar Sino-US poets and scholars generally as a reversal of Harold Isaacs’ category of
secondary involvement: rather than a primary interest in Anglo-American modernism and
192 Corrado Neri, “Sun Yu and the Early Americanization of Chinese Cinema,” in Media, Popular Culture, and the
American Century, ed. Kingsely Bolton and Jan Olsson (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2010), 244.
193 Moon Kwan, A Chinese Mirror: Poems and Plays (Los Angeles: Phoenix Press, 1932).
194 Yu Sun, Li Po: A New Translation (Kowloon, HK: The Commercial Press, 1982).
89
a sustained, secondary interest in China, in the end the primary commitment of these
figures was to the project of Chinese modernity itself; meanwhile, they sustained a
secondary involvement in American modernism to the extent that it could function, in the
words of Kwan, as a “bridge-land of east and west.”
iv. Conclusion: “Westward to Cathay / the Headlong Future Sails”
In the winter of 1934 Harriet Monroe returned to China, visiting Lucy and
gathering material for what would become Poetry’s 1935 “Chinese Number.”195 Her essay
“In Peking” describes Beijing as a “rustily gorgeous, modern city”–a description which
could just as easily apply to Chicago. She reflects:
For me it was the same grand old town which I had descended upon from Siberia
and Manchuria [in 1910]…the oriental glamour which I had almost lost the scent
of through these POETRY years. It was just before the founding of POETRY that I
first breathed that glamorous air, and it was strange to be carried back by the first
whiff of it. “Has Peking changed?” they asked me often, expecting a lament; but I
found little to regret and much to praise.196
As in “The Training of Chinese Children,” Monroe contrasts the “oriental glamour” of
Beijing’s Qianlong-era architecture with the developments of cultural and technological
modernity: “the automobiles which went surging and honking through a maze of vehicles
and pedestrians” and the “pretty Chinese girls in slim brocades” dancing with men at
195 Though Poetry often ran issues with particular themes–including yearly Awards Numbers, multiple
Christmas Numbers, a War Number during World War I, or a 1936 “Social Poets Number”–the “Chinese
Number” was one of a scant few devoted to poetry of a national culture or language.
196 Harriet Monroe, “In Peking,” Poetry 46, no. 1 (1935): 30–31.
90
galas.197 Likewise, she observes how “in the universities student poets were using the
vernacular instead of the classic Mandarin, and large English classes were keenly eager to
know what is going on in the western literary world.”198 Examples of the latter are
highlighted in the number’s inclusion of modernist verse by Xu Zhimo, He Qifang 何其
芳 (Ho Chi-fang), and Lin Geng 林庚 (Lin Keng), translated by Harold Acton–to my
knowledge, the first time contemporaneous Chinese poetry was published in a
general-audience American literary magazine.199
On this second trip, Monroe’s thoughts turned toward the longer history of China’s
engagement with the west. In her travel diary, she considers how Marco Polo traveled from
Western Europe to Beijing when it was previously Khanbaliq, the seat of the Mongolian
khanate under Kublai Khan.200 Polo’s The Description of the World remained the primary point
197 Monroe, “In Peking”, 31, 32. Monroe remarks upon “the narrow hutung [sic] leading to a Chien-Lung
home with its flowering courts and beautiful lofty rooms.”(Monroe, ibid, 31.) The Qianlong 乾隆 emperor
wielded power over China from 1711 until his death in 1799. A comparison could easily be made to the
reign of Queen Victoria in England In the nineteenth century, as far as how they lend their names to
respective ages in their nation’s history which, in hindsight, connote a final high water mark of imperial
splendor or “glamour.”
198 Ibid., 32.
199 See Harriet Monroe, Poetry 46, no. 1 (1935), 14-19. Acton was a British aesthete who ran in the same
Elton College circle as Evelyn Waugh before his decampment to China. His translations with Chen Shixiang in
Modern Chinese Poetry (1936) mark the second significant example of collaborative translation with a Chinese
scholar in Anglo-American modernism. The first, Witter Bynner and Jiang Kanghu’s The Jade Mountain (1922),
a complete translation of the anthology Tangshi San bai shou 唐诗三百首, will be central to the discussion of
interwar translation in chapter two. Chen himself is perhaps most remembered in American poetry for Gary
Snyder’s memorialization of him, nearly half a century later, in the title poem of Axe Handles (1983). Recalling
his time at Berkeley in the 1950s, where Chen was appointed a professor of Chinese and comparative
literature, Snyder writes, “It’s in Lu Ji’s Wên Fu, fourth century / A.D.”Essay on Literature”-—in the /
Preface: “In making the handle / Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The model is indeed near at
hand.” / My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen / Translated that and taught it years ago” (Gary Snyder, Axe Handles
(Albany, CA: North Point Press, 1983), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57150/axe-handles).
200 Harriet Monroe, “China Diary, 1934-1935, 3 Vols.” n.d., Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 4, Folder 8, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
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of information concerning China and the greater Asian world for centuries afterwards.201
Before arriving in China, Monroe composed a brief poem in common meter on this theme
in her diary. Responding to Rudyard Kipling’s endlessly quoted and misquoted “The Ballad
of East and West,” and its refrain “For East is East and West is West,” she concludes, “Now
it is westward to Cathay / The headlong Future sails.”202 Though she refers to China by its
poetically archaic name–popularized in modernist poetry by Pound’s collection of the same
name203–she foresees a future where East-West relations are radically reoriented: rather
than operating by way of Kipling’s England, or Western Europe, the trade winds of the
“headlong Future” would be a geopolitical alliance of China and America–wherefrom one
travels west, not east, to East Asia, and east to Western Europe.204
Monroe sustained an interest in China from her first visit in 1910 until the end of
her tenure at Poetry in 1936, when she unexpectedly died at the age of seventy-six while in
Peru. For others, however, the modernist fascination with East Asia was treated as a
momentary flash in the pan. In the December 1928 number of Poetry, a reviewer expresses
their growing fatigue. They bemoan, “We have had, in the last few years, so many
translations of Chinese and Japanese poems-not always especially interesting in English-that
201 See Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. Sharon Kinoshita (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
2016).
202 Monroe, “China Diary, 1934-1935, 3 Vols.”
203 Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, Edited by Timothy Billings (Fordham University Press, 2019).
204 Deleuze and Guattari later make the same point in A Thousand Plateaus: “America reversed the directions: it
put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge
of the East” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 19).
92
perhaps the novelty is off the oriental manner.”205 Clearly Monroe did not agree. At a 1934
poetry reading at Peking Normal University in 1934, she recited poems by Carl Sandburg,
Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She also read Lindsay’s “The Chinese
Nightingale,” a personal favorite of hers, and Eunice Tietjens’ “The Most-Sacred
Mountain,” on the theme of Mount Taishan 泰山. Her selection of poets attests to how,
even in her late tenure at the magazine, she continued to favor the poetry written at the
nascence of Poetry magazine and American modernism. The next chapter will explore the
out-sized role which China and things Chinese held for these early American modernist
poets. Rather than the fluorescence of translations of Chinese poems in the interwar period
which would fatigue the Poetry reviewer, or the interwar conditional inclusion of Sino-US
poets, the early modernist period was marked by Lindsay, Tietjens, and other poets
fantasizing a hypothetical China in an “oriental manner.”206
205 Poetry 33, no. 3 (1928), 160. The reviewer, Margery Mansfield, was a business manager for Poetry.
206 For a similar phrasing as Mansfield, see also Bynner. In his response to John Fletcher Gould’s account of
imagism, he contends that imagism was a “Japanese rather than Chinese manner.” (Witter Bynner, “Patterns
of Eastern Culture,” in Prose Pieces, ed. James Kraft, The Works of Witter Bynner (1945; repr., New York:
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1979), 238)
93
3. INTERCHAPTER: “THE ORIENTAL MANNER”
In December 1916 a notice appears in Poetry remarking upon a winter lecture series
facilitated by the magazine and representative of its “new movement”:
In the first lecture, on November 19th, Miss Harriet Monroe presented the
historical background of the new movement, besides reading from her own poems.
In the second, on November 26th, Vachel Lindsay personally explained and
illustrated his Poem Games. Padraic Colum, the Irish poet, will speak on December
3rd, and Witter Bynner on December 10th. Among the other speakers will be Amy
Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Davison Ficke, Eunice Tietjens, Mary Aldis, Florence
Kiper Frank, and later in the season Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, the English poet.207
The speakers of the series were selected for their ability to speak to the state of the field of
modernist poetry–and more specifically, the state of Poetry, of which all of the speakers
were contributors. The announcement also indicates the speakers were chosen for their
“personalities,” “which it is to be hoped will stimulate interest in the art,” and that each
will, “in addition to reading from his or her own poems, speak of his method of work and
his theories of the art.”208 And yet another, surprising undercurrent runs through these
assembled speakers in regards to China. Three had immediate familial ties to the country.
Lucy Calhoun's time in China was discussed in the previous chapter, while Lindsay and
Tietjens had missionary siblings stationed in China. (Tietjens’ sister Louise Hammond,
stationed in the eastern city Wuxi 无锡, was a two-time contributor to Poetry herself.) By
1916, Lowell had successfully out-maneuvered Pound to become the arbiter of imagism in
the eyes of the general American public, and afterwards began a project of Chinese poetry
207 “Announcement,” Poetry 9, no. 3 (1916): 162. Though the lecture series is titled Twelve Talks by Poets on
Poetry, only eleven are enumerated in the announcement.
208 Ibid.
94
translations with her childhood friend and sinologist Florence Ayscough, culminating in
The Fir-Flowered Tablets (1921). Ficke had published a book of ekphrastic poems responding
to Japanese ukiyo-e 浮世絵 woodblock prints and would soon accompany Bynner on his
first trip to China and Japan.209 For Bynner, these travels would have a profound effect on
the subsequent direction of his work, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Tietjens
herself had returned from a trip to China earlier that year, which inspired her collection
Profiles from China (1917). Rounding out the participants in the lecture series, Sandburg’s
Chicago Poems (1916) has been argued to display intermittent flashes of East Asian poetics
characteristic of imagism.210 Finally, while Aldis did not publish work related to East Asia
herself, she did review Lowell’s imagist anthology Some Imagist Poets (1916) for The Little
Review;211 as for Colum, he established himself in part by way of his staunch opposition to
imagism.212
As the saying goes, once is chance, twice is coincidence, and three times makes a
trend. So what should be made of fully eight of the eleven announced speakers in this
209 Concerning Japan’s place in American modernism and in the travels of American poets, David Ewick
makes an interesting claim: “British poets continued to travel to and to work in Japan in the twenties, thirties,
and even into the forties, but Bynner and Ficke were the last American poets of note to visit the country from
1917 until after the Second World War.” David Ewick, “Witter Bynner and Japan,” Emerging from Absence: An
Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse, 2003, http://themargins.net/bib/B/BE/00beintro.html.
210 According to Ewick, “the point more correctly is that Sandburg after 1913 incorporated into his work the
principles of imagism, and the influence is more Pound than Japan. Insofar as one can find a likeness to
Japanese poetics in Sandburg’s verse it is in the Chicago Poems, a few of which are brief, unrhymed, and
culminate in a sharp visual image”; David Ewick, “Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Chicago Poems. New York:
Holt, 1916,” Emerging from Absence: An Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse, 2003,
http://themargins.net/bib/C/ca/ca06.html.
211 Mary Aldis, “Review of Some Imagist Poets,” The Little Review 3, no. 4 (1916): 26–31.
212 John Gould Fletcher, “The Orient and Contemporary Poetry,” in The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur
Christy (New York: John Day Company, 1945), 145–74.
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lecture series–of the Americans, eight of nine–all having personal and professional
entanglements with Asia? Well before “the vogue of Chinese poetry” in the interwar
1920s,213 what appears in the work of numerous contributors to Poetry is a persistent,
multivarious engagement with Asia, and China in particular. Yet scholarship insufficiently
distinguishes these engagements of Lindsay, Tietjens, and others from that of the central
figures of this dissertation. Rather than the experimental approach of Monroe, Bynner, or
Pound, the aesthetics of early modernist poets are best understood--to borrow the phrasing
of one of Poetry’s contributors--as poetry in an “oriental manner.”214
i. The Emperor Han Heard A Certain Word
Allen Upward’s “The Word” appears in Poetry’s September 1913 number as part of
a sequence of brief vignettes titled Scented Leaves–From a Chinese Jar. In its entirety, it reads:
The first time the emperor Han heard a certain Word he said, “It is strange.” The
second time he said, “It is divine.” The third time he said, “Let the speaker be put
to death.”215
Strange, divine, and finally intolerable, the prose poem’s relationship to language stands in
direct contrast with the sentiment of Emily Dickinson’s “[A word is dead]”: “A word is
dead / When it is said, Some say. // I say it just / Begins to live / That day.”216 Rather
213 Hsin-Hai Chang, “The Vogue of Chinese Poetry,” Edinburgh Review, no. 236 (1922): 99–114.
214 Margery Mansfield, “Review of Nine Dragons by Bertha Ten Eyck James,” Poetry 33, no. 3 (1928): 161.
215 Allen Upward, “The Word,” Poetry 2, no. 6 (1913): 199.
216 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson (New York, NY: Little, Brown
And Company, 1961), 534–35.
96
than a speaker giving life to “a word” through its enunciation and repetition, in Upward it
is the repetition of “a certain Word” which provokes the emperor to sentence its speaker to
death. Is the reader intended to take this as proscription against “certain” words which
must necessarily be censored by the head of the state–or rather an entreaty, under pain of
death, for variety and novelty of rhetorical expression? The latter reading interprets the
poem as a fantastic staging of modernism's central tenet, to "make it new." Yet within the
diegesis of the prose poem itself, this exhortation becomes untenable: if “a certain Word”
for the “emperor Han” were to refer to any given word, a terrible recursion would soon
take effect which would lead to the destruction of all speakers and language in total.
The title of Upward’s series, Scented Leaves–From a Chinese Jar, recalls that other pillar of
nineteenth century American poetics, Walt Whitman, and his monumental Leaves of Grass. In
both texts, “leaves” serves as a deictic reference towards the pages and poems of the
respective collections. However, Whitman's “leaves of grass” indicate his subject as
radically commonplace and grounded--even as his expansive, prophetic verse reveals the
rhizomatic multiplicity of American experience. In contrast, the “leaves” in Upward are
racially particularized and “scented,” indicating a suspension of logic and a decadent
derangement of the senses. Rather than the transformative possibility space of Whitman’s
radically inclusive subjectivity, Upward offers a transportive, oneiric flight of fancy. The tea
“leaves” of his poems arrive as if from another space and time: a preserved "Chinese" past
displaced to an Anglo-American present. Upward's ahistorical China continues in the steps
of Hegel, and his infamous declaration that China’s sociohistorical development exists
somewhere outside of the zeitgeist of history.
Monroe was herself relatively indifferent to the historical provenance of Upward’s
“The Word.” Rather, it was Pound, who served as liaison between Monroe and Upward in
97
his capacity as the magazine’s “international correspondent,” that expressed serious
misgivings concerning the collection.217 Responding to Pound’s concerns, Upward
explains to Monroe that his poems “are only recollections of Chinese culture literature in
the sense that the flowers are recollections of the rains.” In particular, his understanding of
Chinese culture is “derived from the classic ‘Book of Odes’ in Legge’s translation, and from
Prof. Giles’s History of Chinese literature.” Upward was introduced to these texts by the
amateur sinologist Launcelot Cranmer-Byng, who ran the “Wisdom of the East” series at
John Murray in London, and who published texts throughout the 1910s such as Lawrence
Binyon’s Flight of the Dragon (1911) and Byng’s own Chinese translations.218 In turn, Upward
introduced Giles’ History of Chinese Literature to Pound, a text which had considerable
consequence for Pound's engagement with Chinese culture, poetry, and language.219
Upward allows that “of course Kublai and the Ming emperors are historical
personages,” yet their appearance in his collection are not intended to imply historical
accuracy; as he puts it, referencing his description of the Ming Tombs elsewhere in Scented
Leaves, “whether willows grow round them I do not know.” Instead, what he seeks to
convey is “the spirit” of Chinese poetry, “without much caring for the accuracy of the local
217 According to Huang, Upward's poems “immediately caught Pound’s attention because they were
reminiscent of his own experience with those Chinese paintings in the British Museum.” Yet Huang leaves it
unclear how or when Pound first encountered the poems. In fact, it was Pound's enthusiasm for them that
prompted Upward's submission to Poetry (Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and
Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2002),
67). See also "Personal Letter to Harriet Monroe from Allen Upward," January 10, 1914, Harriet Monroe
Papers, Box 26, Folder 9, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
218 “Personal Letter to Harriet Monroe from Allen Upward,” February 24, 1913, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box
26, Folder 9, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. As Upward further relates to
Monroe, “Some years ago a friend and I started a small series ‘Wisdom of the East’…One booklet contains
versifications of the Odes from Legge’s prose rendering.”
219 Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 67.
98
color.” As a kind of intellectual exercise, Upward muses to Monroe, “It would be
interesting if you were to send the ‘Leaves’ to Pekin, when they appear, or find out how
they strike a Chinese scholar. I have never been to China, and very much wish I could
go.”220 Monroe’s response to Upward on the matter is placid and direct:
I thought you did not wish us to explain fully the fact that those Chinese things
were chiefly yours. ‘Paraphrase’ seems to me a rather loose word, which the
knowing would stretch to cover the case. Of course, I should be delighted to make
an explanation.221
In the end, in the back matter of the October 1913 number, concluding Upward’s
biography, the following note appears: “The Scented Leaves are not direct translations, but
paraphrases from the Chinese.”222 Regarding how much of “The Word” corresponds to
Giles and established Chinese history, and how much of it is “paraphrase,” it happens there
was indeed an “emperor Han” – Han Gaozu 漢高祖, or “High Founder of the Han,”
more often referred to by his given name Liu Bang 劉邦. However, Giles quickly passes
over this figure in History of Chinese Literature and never references him by name. Instead, the
beginning of his chapters which are notionally concerned with the "Han Dynasty" instead
discuss at length Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, the despotic “first emperor” of a united China
whose reign is appropriately identified as the Qin dynasty. According to tradition, Qin
220 “Personal Letter to Harriet Monroe from Allen Upward.”
221 “Personal Letter to Allen Upward from Harriet Monroe,” October 6, 1913, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box
26, Folder 9, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
222 “Notes,” Poetry 2, no. 6 (1913): 228.
99
Shihuang burned the Confucian classics and buried the Confucian scholars alive in his
attempt to eliminate all recorded history which preceded him.223
Insofar as Scented Leaves operates akin to an extended daydream or reverie precipitated
by an ambiguity in Legge and Giles’s sinological work, Upward’s invocation of references
to the Ming tombs and Kublai Khan invites comparison to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan” and the poem’s subtitle, “A vision in a dream. A fragment.” Nominally set in
the reign of another emperor of China, approximately 1400 years after the Qin dynasty,
the poem famously begins, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure-dome
decree.”224 The “Xanadu” of Coleridge’s poem is the summer capital Shangdu (上都) of
the Mongolian Yuan khanate, which was founded by Kublai (in Mandarin, Hubilie 忽必烈)
and located roughly 200 miles north of the country’s capital of Khanbaliq or Dadu (大
都)–now called Beijing. Like James Hilton’s description of a “Shangri-La” ensconced in the
Lost Horizon (1933) of the Tibetan Himalayas, the opulence and instability of Coleridge’s
vision–brimming with incongruous details such as an “Abyssinian maid” who sings of
“Mount Agora” on her dulcimer–obscures its actual geographical referent and historical
facticity. What Coleridge describes as Kubla’s “pleasure-dome” is roughly concordant with
Marco Polo’s description, later paraphrased in Samuel Purchas’ Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625),
223 Herbert Giles, trans., A History of Chinese Literature (1901; repr., New York: D. Appleton and Company,
2013), 78–79, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43711/43711-h/43711-h.htm.This telling is preserved in the
Chinese chengyu 成语, or fixed phrase, fenshu kengru 焚书坑儒–“burning books and burying Confucianists.”
Given that this information comes down from the Book of Han (汉书 Hanshu), the subsequent dynasty which
usurped him, there is pervasive skepticism in contemporary scholarship about the accuracy and extent of
these claims.
224 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in Christabel; Kubla Khan; The Pains of Sleep (1816; repr., John Murray:
London, 2020), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Christabel;_Kubla_Khan;_The_Pains_of_Sleep_(1816)/Kubla_Khan.
100
of Shangdu as a walled city of permanent settlements and mobile yurt tents.225 All the rest,
including the sacred river “Alph,” which “ran / Through caverns measureless to man /
Down to a sunless sea,” are Coleridge’s invention alone.
Coleridge’s account of the poem’s genesis should also be considered. The preface to
the poem describes how he fell asleep in a chair while reading Purchas’s Pilgrimes, having
ingested "an anodyne” of the opium tincture laudanum for a “slight indisposition.”
Consequently, “On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the
whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that
are here preserved.”226 “Kubla Khan” is thus not offered to the reader as a dream-like
reverie as such, but as the mediation of Coleridge’s transcription of his “distinct
recollection” of a dream; moreover, not just any dream, but an opium dream of China: a
country itself somatically associated with opium as a result of the historical and material
conditions of British colonialism.227
The result is a poem which emerges out of a confluence of China’s historical
entanglements with the west: first as the eastern terminus of inter-imperial trade along the
Silk Road, and afterwards as semi-colonial subject. Yet “Kubla Khan” has been historically
read first and foremost as suggestive of the free play of the human imagination, particularly
225 Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. Sharon Kinoshita (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2016),
66.
226 Coleridge, “Kubla Khan.”
227 For a discussion of deterministic readings of Chinese characteristics in light of this historical relationship,
see for example Eric Hayot, “Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, no. 1
(2006): 120–54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41490956.
101
in light of Coleridge’s own philosophy of imagination.228 According to Coleridge, primary
imagination corresponds to immediate sense perception–the infinite, “eternal act of
creation” registered within man’s “finite mind.” Secondary imagination results when the
mind re-organizes these impressions according to “laws of association,” as with fantasy, or
“fancy”; or when it undergoes an “esemplastic” process which “dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates in order to recreate.” It is this latter imagination, which attempts to arrive at an
ideal, transcendent unity of experience–and thereby reconnects the finite human mind to
the divine infinite–which Coleridge calls poetic imagination.229 However, if we go by his
own telling, what “Kubla Khan” emphatically is not is a poem which demarcates a
profound transformation of Coleridge’s perceptual understanding of his own life and
artistic work, but rather a moment of inspiration which befell him as if by magic, and
consequently one to which he could never return. As the preface concludes, “the Author
has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to
him…but the to-morrow is yet to come.”230
ii. The Successor of Merlin
228 See, for example, James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 46.
229 Ibid., 120–21.
230 Coleridge, “Kubla Khan.”
102
In “The Lyric in Poetry,” published in the June 1923 number of Poetry
Magazine, Eunice Tietjens considers the work of the "lyrical" mode in terms of energy. She
quotes approvingly from a novelist acquaintance, who states that the function of art is to
“step up life, as an engineer steps up energy.” However, instead of pursuing the possible
connections between modernist art and scientific innovation, as was often the case with
Monroe and Pound, she instead pivots this notion of intensified experience towards a
consideration of the transcendental:
In the world of today the lyric poet is the successor of Merlin. He alone can weave
spells about common things and turn them by a sure alchemy into the pure gold of
inescapable beauty. He alone can step up life. Today the outward phenomena of
magic have been stripped away. It was enough for Aladdin’s djinn to wave his hand
and create a palace overnight. Nowadays any wealthy man can wave a million and
create the same effect. But we know it is not magic. What was magical in the djinn
was the escape from reality, the freeing of the heart of Aladdin from the bounds of
self. And this is the power of the lyric poet-a power which time cannot touch.231
If modernity for Tietjens is fundamentally a condition of disenchantment, where “the
outward phenomena of magic” has been “stripped” from lived experience, then the
purchase of the modernist lyric is an ability to “step up life” by means of an aesthetic
escape from reality. In this way, the modernist poet proves themselves “the successor of
Merlin” in their ability to alchemize experiences of “inescapable beauty” within a modern
world otherwise disenchanted of his magic.
A poem suffused with such a transportive magic for both Monroe and Tietjens is
Vachel Lindsay’s “The Chinese Nightingale.” Lindsay was born in Springfield Illinois, just
south of the twin towns of Canton and Pekin–both apocryphally named according to the
belief that United States and China were geographically antipodal from one another.232 A
231 Eunice Tietjens, “The Lyric in Poetry,” Poetry 22, no. 3 (1923): 153.
232 “Pekin, Illinois,” Wikipedia, n.d., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pekin,_Illinois#Origins_of_Pekin.
103
note which accompanies the publication of “The Chinese Nightingale” in Poetry explains,
“Mr. Lindsay wrote The Chinese Nightingale in Springfield and New York, between May
and October, 1914, while his father and mother were in China visiting their son-in-law
and daughter, who are medical missionaries at Lu-Chow-Fu.” It continues:
The poet, who has never seen China himself, says of the poem: “The intention of
the piece is to combine such elements of Chinese decoration and whim as are to be
found by the superficial observer in the curio-store, the chop-suey restaurant, the
laundry, the Chinese theatre. To these are to be added such general ideas of China
as may be acquired in any brief resume of their religion, their customs and
temperament.”233
As Olson puts it, Lindsay sought “To locate the nascent origins of creative expression in
African or Chinese or Native American” culture.234 “The Congo,” his most anthologized
poem, locates a percussive, driving intensity in its primitivist depiction of male black
bodies engaged in a “hoodoo” ritual235; on the other side of the coin, “The Chinese
Nightingale” effects a more subtle, elegant narrative derived from the “decoration and
whim” of Chinese culture’s “superficial” aspects. As with Upward, Lindsay locates Chinese
culture in a thoroughly imaginary past; however, Lindsay seeks to bring this past to bear on
a diasporic Chinese American present. Deep in the night, while “San Francisco sleeps as the
dead,” the laundryman Chang, “with a countenance of stone, / ironed and ironed
233 “Notes,” Poetry 5, no. 5 (1915): 247–49, 247. Luzhou 泸州 was a key port city in early 20th century
China along the Yangtze river (Changjiang 长江, literally “long river”) in Southwest Sichuan province.
234 Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2017), 289.
235 For a contemporary evaluation of “The Congo,” see “Noncanonical Congo: A Discussion of Vachel
Lindsay’s ‘The Congo.’” Poetry Foundation, November 30, 2009,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/75438/noncanonical-congo-a-discussion-of-vachel-lindsays-the-congo.
104
alone.”236 Soon, however, the “joss” incense sticks which he has lit become animate, and
regale him with a song set in a China so ancient that even “Confucius was not yet born,”237
a lost utopia where, “When all the world was drinking blood… / We drank our tea in
China, beneath the sacred spice-trees,”238 and “Spring came on forever.”239
In Florence Kiper Frank’s “The Movies,” anthologized in Monroe’s The New Poetry,
the medium of film is ambivalently described as a “cheap release / From worry and from
pain.”240 In his correspondence with Monroe, Upward likewise remarks, “It is time we
had some literature not competing with the Picture Palace.”241 Yet in Lindsay it is
nonetheless the elegiac song of a lost love and remembrance of a mythic, lost Chinese
civilization which provides Chang with a momentary “release” from his life of cramped,
urban tenement walls and the drudgery of menial physical labor. The oneiric reverie of
“The Chinese Nightingale” was certainly no less diverting than anything to be found at
“the movies" for the readers of Poetry. From today’s viewpoint, the poem's narration in
song by a talking incense stick resembles nothing so much as the Hollywood musical,
which Richard Dyer describes as existing on a continuum of “Entertainment and Utopia,”
with genre tropes and racial caricatures on one end, and on the other an evocation of a
236 Vachel Lindsay, “The Chinese Nightingale,” Poetry 5, no. 5 (1915): 199, 200.
237 Ibid., 202.
238 Ibid., 199.
239 Ibid., 201.
240 Florence Kiper Frank, “The Movies,” in The New Poetry (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1917), 163–64.
241 “Personal Letter to Harriet Monroe from Allen Upward,” June 2, 1913, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 26,
Folder 9, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
105
prelapsarian world through which we can fantasize ways in which our own world could be
otherwise.242
iii. Profiles from China
Tietjens’ Profiles from China proved to be neither entertainment nor utopia.243 With
the exception of “Echoes,” a section in the middle of the book of eight short poems
remarkably similar to Upward’s Scented Leaves, her poems are stamped throughout with
reportage datelines: Wuxi [Wusih], Nanjing [Nanking], Suzhou [Soochow], Beijing
[Peking], Hankou [Hankow], Shanghai. Combined with her section titles, “From the
Interior” and “China of the Tourists,” these paratextual elements attest to the collection's
facticity, derived from her travels in China while visiting her sister Louise Hammond, a
missionary residing in Wuxi in Jiangsu province. As Louis Untermeyer blurbs in an
advertisement for the book, the poems constitute “the emotional gleanings of a winter
spent in a Chinese city in the interior.”244
The speaker of Tietjens’ poems frequently serves as an intermediary for the
American reader, a tour guide providing access to a contemporary China quite different
from Lindsay's “elements of Chinese decoration and whim as are to be found by the
242 Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment (Routledge, 2002), 19–35. In particular,
the technical finesse, anthropomorphism, and doubtful evocation of exotic, distant lands in “The
Nightingale” calls to mind the animated musical, the template of which was established by Disney in the
1930s and 1940s.
243 Eunice Tietjens, Profiles from China (New York, NY: Knopf, 1917).
244 “Advertisement for Profiles from China,” n.d. Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 4 Folder 48. Special Collections
Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
106
superficial observer.” The form of Tietjens' approach, and its self-imposed limitations, can
be seen in “The Story Teller,” a poem which appears early in Profiles from China, and was
published alongside “The Most-Sacred Mountain,” “Our Chinese Acquaintance,” and other
poems from the collection in the December 1916 number of Poetry.245 It begins with a
scene reminiscent of “The Chinese Nightingale,” a storyteller sitting “in a corner of the
market-place,” spinning a tale: perhaps of “a fox-maiden” bewitching a scholar, “an
unfilial son tortured” by devils, or “a decadent queen” conniving with her eunuchs.
However, unlike Lindsay, the poem does not transport us as readers into another time and
place, but instead denies us access to the story teller's tale altogether. However “Artful are
the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and full of guile,” the poem's speaker does not know
Chinese. The speaker, the story teller, and the reader alike remain “alien” and alienated
from one another.246
If we follow Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” the transition between the oral
storyteller and the written narrative is a shift in aesthetic mediation which coincides with
the epistemological break of modernity, whereby “wisdom” which the storyteller brings
from afar becomes converted into the “information” of the written text.247 Tietjens’ “The
Story Teller” likewise presents a speaker of the modern western world encountering an
incomplete Chinese modernity, where both premodern wisdom and Dickensian
industrialization vie with one another for dominance. Moreover, this ontological gap is
racialized and rendered impassible by Tietjens. The result is best understand, borrowing
245 Poetry 9, no. 3 (1916).
246 Tietjens, Profiles from China, 18–19.
247 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),
83–109.
107
from Nan Da, as an “intransitive encounter,” with no equivalences, conversion, exchanges,
or even appropriation possible.248 Over and over, across different milieus and locations,
Tietjens' consistent theme presents itself in Profiles from China, of “the Orient–struggling and
suffering, spawning and dying–but what it is I shall never know.”249 At best, as articulated
in “New China: The Iron Works,” the industrial and technological advancements of the
west which have been “embedded in the east” only amount to “to-tomorrow set in
yesterday,” “a graft but not a growth.”250 In the face of this dim outlook, Tietjens’ speaker
in “Reflections in a Ricksha” is chagrined to report, “I grow insufferably superior and
Anglo-Saxon. / One is what one is.”251
If one is what one is, then what exactly is Profiles from China? The predominant mode
of the collection–a combination of free verse and somewhat depersonalized dramatic
monologue–bares an unmistakable resemblance to Edgar Lee Masters' contemporaneous
and wildly acclaimed Spoon River Anthology. In a rare instance of Poetry reprinting material
originally appearing elsewhere, a selection from Masters’ cycle of poems ran in the
magazine in 1914.252 By 1915, still before the book's official print publication, Poetry’s
editors declared Masters’ poems to be “the literary sensation of the year,” and that it “may
248 Nan Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018).
249 Tietjens, Profiles from China, 46.
250 Ibid., 41.
251 Ibid., 62.
252 “Our Contemporaries,” Poetry 5, no. 1 (1914): 42–45. Alice Coburn Henderson later argues that Pound
and Tietjens’ should be credited with their early discovery of Masters while he was still a relatively unknown
quantity; see Alice Corbin Henderson, “Review of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters,” Poetry 6, no.
3 (1915): 145–49.
108
prove a masterpiece in the wise judgment of posterity.”253 Whereas Spoon River Anthology is an
intimate portrayal of “the vibration of the soul” of a small midwestern town, Tietjens'
collection takes the resolute point of view of an outsider.254 Nonetheless, the advertisement
for Profiles from China ran with an approving blurb from Masters himself, alongside similar
comments from Lindsay, Sandburg, Lowell and Louis Untermeyer.255 Masters, Lindsay,
and Sandburg were all based in and around the Chicagoland area, and Tietjens’ poetry
reflects the impact of regional modernism upon early modernist free verse generally. Even
in China--or especially in China--Tietjens grows not only more Anglo-Saxon in sentiment,
but Midwestern in literary style.256 Untermeyer’s quotations within this advertisement also
bare further reflection. He begins, “These are times when the Orient becomes increasingly
important. Our eyes are turned to the East with a growing understanding or, at least, a
desire to understand.” As for Tietjens’ turn to the east, he claims, “there is no
pseudo-orientalism in this book. It is the record, both humorous and tragic, of a profound
spiritual experience, and it is by a genuine poet.”257 Untermeyer attests to an emergent
cultural interest in China in interwar America; yet his generalized claims are surprisingly
253 “Notes,” Poetry 5, no. 5 (1915): 247.
254 Edgar Lee Masters, “What Is Poetry,” Poetry 6, no. 6 (1915): 306–8, 308. The collection proved too
intimate for some: It is attested that a self-enforced ban by local booksellers and librarians made Spoon River
Anthology unavailable in Lewistown, Illinois for decades after its publication. See Laura Wolff Scanlan, “How
the Once-Banned Spoon River Anthology Made a Comeback in Lewistown,” Humanities 36, no. 6 (2015),
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/novemberdecember/statement/how-the-once-banned-spoon-river-anthology-made-comeback-
i.
255 “Advertisement for Profiles from China.”
256 For a discussion of how Poetrymagazine and early modernist poetry attest to the regionalism of early
American modernism, see Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance.
257 Ibid.
109
tenuous when applied to Tietjens. Given our analysis of “The Story Teller” above, does she
“desire to understand”? If not, what else is her purpose?
The cover of Profiles from China’s first edition, as depicted in the advertisement, offers
a clue concerning the book's thesis. Along with the book’s name, calligraphed in a
stereotypical “wonton” font style, the dust jacket is adorned with the single Chinese
character di 狄. The Di were one of the four “barbarian” tribes who, alongside the Yi 夷,
Man 蛮, and Rong 戎, proverbially bordered China's north, east, south and west in
antiquity. The way in which these tribes were understood within the Chinese sociocultural
sphere is conveyed in James Legge’s translation of the Confucian Analects (Lunyu 论语):
“The Master said, ‘The rude tribes of the east and north have their princes, and are not like
the States of our great land which are without them.’ 子曰、夷狄之有君、不如诸夏之亡
也 Zi yue, yidi zhi you jun, buru zhu xia zhi wang ye.”258 These tribes were consistently employed,
often interchangeably, so as to provide rhetorical contrast, signify otherness, or assert a
chauvinist Han or Huaxia 华夏 superiority. This is seen in Mengzi 孟子, commonly known
by Legge’s appellation of "Mencius." He observes, “I have heard of men using the doctrines
of our great land to change barbarians, but I have never yet heard of any being changed by
barbarians. 吾闻用夏变夷者，未闻变于夷者也 Wu wen yong xia bian yi zhe, wei wen bian yu yi
zhe ye.”259
258 James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics: Confucian Analects, 2009,
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4094.
259 James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics: Vol. 2 The Works of Mencius, 2019,
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Classics/Volume_2/The_Works_of_Mencius/chapter05.
110
Together with Pound’s Cathay, which preceded it, and Lowell and Florence
Ayscough's Fir-Flower Tablets and Bynner and Jiang Kanghu's The Jade Mountain, which both
came afterwards, Profiles fromChina constitutes a modernist tetralogy of publications which
employ Chinese characters as cover illustrations. The characters on Fir-Flower Tablets and The
Jade Mountain–songhua jian 松花笺 and yu shantou 玉山头, respectively–are literal
equivalences to their English titles and are indicative of their engagements with China as
translation projects. In contrast, the single characters on the covers of Profiles from China and
Cathay," di and yao 耀 provide commentary or perspectival approaches towards the contents
of these books. The importance of the character yao within Pound's aesthetic theory will be
explored at length in chapter three. As for Tietjens, the question is raised: who are the Di,
or "northern barbarians" of Profiles from China? On the surface, the answer is obvious: the
Chinese people themselves. Over and over, her speaker is sensorially assaulted by “filth”
and “stench,” “leprous hands” clutching at her skirt as she passes, and of the
“unbelievable” odors of latrines in spring.260 In the entirety of the city of Wuxi, it is only
in the Western settlements, “the great church of the mission within the wall” and “the
courtyard of the great factory beyond the wall," that she can “breathe.” Lest the reader
overlook the telling comparison, she elaborates, “The mission and the factory are the West.
What they are I know.”261 Indeed, when she does happen upon something which delights
her, such as the “tawny charm” of a camel in Beijing her conclusion is that this animal is
260 Tietjens, Profiles from China, 42-44.
261 Ibid., 45.
111
not Chinese at all, but something else which has arrived from and will return to parts
unknown. She remarks, “Here in the city you are alien, even as I am alien.”262
Dewey observes that, perhaps contrary to expectations, “Sometimes the natives of a
country resent [the delighted] visitor even more than they do that of the grumbler and
fault finder. They feel that they are not treated as reality but merely as something to look at
and enjoy.”263 Certainly Tietjens identifies a ready number of “native” friends to
corroborate her antipathies. In contrast with Monroe, who was enchanted by the tiled roofs
of Beijing and its hutong 胡同 residential neighborhoods, Tietjens’ speaker in one poem
meets her “Chinese acquaintance” “in the runway called a street, between the warrens
known as houses.” Adorned in continental dress and ideas, her intellectual acquaintance
who has recently returned from overseas is also rendered “alien here,” and expresses a
“troubled uncertainty” towards China which mirrors her own: “China is very
dirty……Our priests are rascals, and the people……I do not know.”264 The unresolved
tension within her poems is thus not derived from a modernist defamiliarization or other
stylistic techniques, but a perpetual social and cultural estrangement from the everyday
conditions in which she finds herself. At the corner of a street in Wuxi, a “venerable
Chinaman with a face such as Confucius must have worn” relieves himself in broad
daylight, “suspended in mid-air over the broken pottery rim.”265 The moment which
262 Ibid., 63.
263 John Dewey, Anne S Sharpe, and Carl Cohen, “Some Factors in Mutual National Understanding,” in The
Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 13 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press,
1983), 263.
264 Tietjens, Profiles from China, 35, ellipses in original.
265 Ibid., 44.
112
Tietjens captures is cheap and exploitative, pushing her description of squalor to its
inevitable conclusion and rendering her “venerable Chinaman” as bestial and inhuman.
Dewey notes, “Those who are not sensitive to new impressions and who have little esthetic
taste go about criticizing what they see because it is unlike that which they are acquainted
with and of which they have grown fond.”266 But is it “God’s own country” back in
Chicago which Tietjens has grown fond, or somewhere else entirely? As she passes the man
self-consciously, she observes, enigmatically, that “He gazes at me contemplatively…with
eyes in which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.”267
Dewey diagnoses the two extremes of travelers: persons who “are always
discontented when they are abroad,” and those “in perpetual raptures over what is seen,
and travel is a continual delight.”268 Tietjens represents a third category: those who first
“travel in imagination,” and afterwards find actual lived experience wanting.269 In neither
the urban squalor of modern China nor a disenchanted American midwest can she
commune with “the philosophy of the ages.” To do so, she must turn to the romantic
sublime of Taishan 泰山, “The Most-Sacred Mountain.” Here she is able to escape the
blight of China’s present, if only temporarily, and arrive at a place in which, “when
Confucius came, half a thousand years before the Nazarene, he stepped with me, thus into
266 Dewey, Sharpe, and Cohen, “Some Factors in Mutual National Understanding,” 262.
267 Tietjens, Profiles from China, 44.
268 Dewey, Sharpe, and Cohen, “Some Factors in Mutual National Understanding,” 262–63.
269 Ibid., 263. Dewey is at times notoriously inconsistent with his own terminology, particularly in his
writing for a general public. Here his usage of “imagination” is akin to idle ideation and fantasy, in direct
contrast with a transformative imagination which he aligns with creativity.
113
timelessness.”270 Having moved beyond chrononormative time, she is enmeshed in the
infinite simultaneity of the natural world, where “the rhythm ceases,”271 and “Li Po [Li Bai
李白], who was very drunk, wrote an impassioned poem to the moon.”272 Like Coleridge
leaving Xanadu, she carries her glimpses of what lays beyond back to the material world:
And time will close around me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily
round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time
ravel thin about me;
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.273
Likewise, at Tiantan 天坛, “The Altar of Heaven” admired by Monroe established in the
Ming dynasty and ensconced in the center of Beijing, she is confronted with a natural
divinity unattainable within western religious doctrine or a house of worship: “Heaven is
very near. / For this is worship native as the air, wide as the wind, and poignant as the rain.
/ Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.”274 In the final analysis, Tietjens' antipathy towards
China's present reveals her dissatisfaction with both American and Chinese modernity,
which by any measure can only be understood by her as "barbaric" in comparison to
China's imagined, arcadian past. Concluding Profiles from China, she considers Shanghai's
extraterritorial "mixed court" system, presided over by a sharply intelligent but corrupt
270 Tietjens, Profiles fromChina, 38.
271 Ibid.
272 Ibid., 540.
273 Ibid., 39.
274 Ibid., 69.
114
Chinese judge and an honest but dim and disinterested western judge. The final line of the
collection is an unresolved question hovering in the air: “The judges put their heads
together. They are civilization and they are very grave. / What, I wonder, is
civilization?”275
The first chapter of this dissertation identified Monroe's transformation of poetry's
role in American modernism in light of her transpacific circulation of Chinese civilizational
power. Unlike Tietjens, who avows here that "civilization" is nowhere to be found,
whether one look to the East or West, Monroe perceived the progress of American and
Chinese modernity as inextricable from one another. Yet Monroe herself made no aesthetic
statements or editorial judgments regarding the how and why of a poem’s engagement
with China, “so long as they give us something of the rare flavor, the special exquisite
perfume” of that country and its “royal line of Chinese poets,” whose “delicate and
beautiful art” were only just beginning to be discovered by American poets.276 China
emerged as a central preoccupation for both the canonical figures of high modernism and
her own coterie of regional, early modernist poets. As Wallace Stevens pronounced,
reflecting on a box of jasmine tea shipped to him from Beijing by Lucy Calhoun, “for a
poet to have even a second-hand contact with China is a great matter.”277 Reprinting these
words as a blind item in the “News Notes” of a 1923 number of Poetry, Monroe observes,
275 Ibid., 77.
276 Harriet Monroe, “Introduction,” in TheNewPoetry (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1917),
https://www.bartleby.com/265/1000.html.
277 Holly Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 253.
115
“The Orient allures the poets more and more.”278 In this sense, Monroe's early focus on
China proved to be the absolute cutting edge of the cultural avant-garde. From the very
beginning, she asserted, “This oriental influence is to be welcomed because it flows from
deep original streams of poetic art. We should not be afraid to learn from it.”279
This section of the dissertation has sought to not only "learn from" early modernist
poetry written in the oriental manner, but also evaluate it in light of the transpacific
experimentalism of Dewey, Monroe, Bynner, and Pound. That most of the texts discussed
in this section have been dismissed or forgotten by contemporary scholars is indicative of
the way they can be assessed as failures of imagination in the Deweyan sense. Yet such
evaluations also tend to broadly typify modernist engagements with China as a whole as
aesthetically minor, culturally appropriative, and perhaps best consigned to the dustbin of
history. Anne Witchard, the editor of the recent collection British Modernism and Chinoiserie,
acknowledges that time has not been kind to this area of study: what once was redolent to
Stevens of “the good smells out of China”280 now arrives to us mildewed and orientalist.
Seeking to raise such work out of obscurity, Witchard identifies Upward’s poems and
Pound’s Cathay as cut from the same cloth.281 Scholars such as Huang likewise note the
usage of Giles’ History of Chinese Literature in both Upward and Pound. Building on the
scholarship of Robert Kern, he describes the pair as being engaged in “intertextual
278 “News Notes,” Poetry 21, no. 5 (1923): 287–89.
279 Monroe, “Introduction.”
280 Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 253.
281 Anne Witchard, ed., “Introduction: ‘The Lucid Atmosphere of Fine Cathay,’” British Modernism and Chinoiserie
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 3–4.
116
reorientalizations.”282 On this point, what constitutes a contemporary critical intervention
for Witchard and others is tantamount to a return to Monroe’s earlier aesthetic judgment,
which likewise did not separate the wheat from the chaff. In her 1917 anthology on the
“new poetry"–the majority of which was previously published in Poetry–Pound’s “The
River-Merchant’s Wife” and “Exile’s Letter” appear alongside Tietjens’s “The Most-sacred
Mountain,” Lindsay’s “The Chinese Nightingale,” and sixteen poems from Upward’s Scented
Leaves, concluding with “The Word.”283 Likewise, Pound anthologized several of Upward’s
poems from Scented Leaves in the first imagist anthology, Des Imagistes, beginning with “The
Bitter Purple Willows”–which, the poem relates, inaccurately, are found “growing round
the tombs of the exalted Mings.” “The Word” and its homicidal emperor are omitted from
the selection.284
Monroe observes that for the early modernist poets, “The task is difficult, because
our poets, ignorant of Chinese, have to get at these masters through the literal translations
of scholars.”285 However, as the Great War came to a close, a new battlefront emerged,
with many would-be literary translators weighing in on how best to translate Chinese
poetry. The next chapter will explore how Monroe and Tietjens put their own fingers on
this scale, with Poetry becoming a staging ground for the Chinese translation battles of
interwar modernism.
282 Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 68. Also 67-69 passim.
283 Harriet Monroe, ed., The New Poetry (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1917),
https://www.bartleby.com/265/index1.html.
284 Ezra Pound, ed., Des Imagistes (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1914), 51–53.
285 Monroe, “Introduction.”
117
4. CHAPTER TWO: BOXING MATCHES AND / CHINESE POEMS
In 1953, Poetry editor Karl Shapiro replied to a letter of inquiry from one Mr. Adnan
Caknakcioglu, concerning whether the magazine would be interested in his translations of
classical Turkish poetry. Though Shapiro expresses interest in the translator’s project, he
also tempers his expectations, advising that “POETRY does print a certain amount of
translated verse, but only rarely.”286 What is surprising about this statement is how it
wildly contrasts with the editorial direction of the magazine in the interwar years. The first
chapter of this dissertation previously discussed the publication of Sino-US poets in Poetry,
and how their conditional inclusion tended towards translations of classical Chinese poetry.
In the fall of 1922, Eunice Tietjens published a two-part series attesting to the magazine’s
interest in China, titled “On Translating Chinese Poetry.” Remarkably, Pound’s Cathay is
largely left out of Tietjens’ brief, yet surprisingly comprehensive history of English literary
translations of Chinese poetry. Instead, she focuses her attention on subsequent work by
Arthur Waley, Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, and Witter Bynner and Jiang Kanghu
江亢虎 (1922)–all of which, like Cathay, contain sections which first appeared in Poetry.287
Of the three, she estimates the collaborative translations of Bynner and Jiang as singularly
286 “Letter from Karl Shapiro to Adnan Caknakcioglu,” 1953, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 73, Folder 9,
Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
287 Ezra Pound, Cathay, ed. Ernest Fenollosa, Mary de Rachewiltz, and Zhaoming Qian (1915; repr., New
York: New Directions, 2015); Arthur Waley, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable and
Company, 1918); Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922),
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/lowell/tablets/tablets.html.
118
“valid and universal in uttering beauty.”288 By the end of the year Lowell was openly
feuding with Bynner and Tietjens in the pages of Poetry; the following year, in Spring And All
(1923), William Carlos Williams would observe, “men knock blindly together / splitting
their heads open / That is why boxing matches and / Chinese poems are the same.”289
This chapter will map the translation debates and battles of interwar American modernism.
Instead of being a phenomenon particular to our contemporary age, the contention over
modernism’s translational engagements with China is revealed here to be centripetal to the
development of Anglo-American modernist poetry itself. Though Cathay is often treated as
sui generis within modernism, and the sole point of influence for literary Chinese translation
in subsequent generations, this chapter recovers Bynner and Jiang’s collaboration on The
Jade Mountain as a critical text of transpacific American modernism.
288 Eunice Tietjens, “On Translating Chinese Poetry: I,” Poetry 20, no. 5 (August 1922): 331.
289 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923; repr., New York, NY: New Directions, 2013), 44. As it
happens, Williams was no disinterested party: thirty-five years after Spring and All he briefly attempted his own
Chinese translations with the support of David Rafael Hsin-fu Wand; see Jonathan Cohen, “Empty
Hills—Deep Woods—Green Moss: William Carlos Williams’s Chinese Experiment,” Words Without Borders,
April 26, 2018,
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2018-04/william-carlos-williamss-chinese-experiment-jonathan-cohen/. Zhaoming
Qian argues that sections of Spring and All itself, beyond the epigrammatic observation previously cited, bear
the trace of Williams’ extensive engagement with Chinese poetry; see Zhaoming Qian, East-West Exchange and
Late Modernism: Williams, Moore, Pound (University of Virginia Press, 2017), doi:10.2307/j.ctt1wvwdnr. Williams’
own personal library included the Cantonese primer Chinese Made Easy (1904, with an introduction by Herbert
Giles), Herbert Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature (1916 [1901]), Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems (1919) and More
Translations from the Chinese (1919), Pound’s Cathay (1915) and Instigations (1920), Bynner and Jiang’s The Jade
Mountain (1929), H.T. Tsiang’s self-published novels China Red (1931) and The Hanging on Union Square (1935),
and Lin Yutang’s The Gay Genius (1947); see “Descriptive List of Works from the Library of William Carlos
Williams at Fairleigh Dickinson University,” William Carlos Williams Review 10, no. 2 (1984): 30–53.
119
i. Tempest in a China Teacup
If we are led to believe, as T.S. Eliot has it, that Pound was the “inventor of Chinese
poetry for our time” with the publication of Cathay in 1915, then it appears a reviewer of
Lowell and Ayscough’s Fir-Flower Tablets in Chinese Students’ Monthly did not get the message.
Beginning with the supposition that translation from the Chinese language “has always
remained an insuperable difficulty,” the reviewer nonetheless observes, “it certainly looks
that Chinese poetry is beginning to be appreciated by the cultivated English-reading
public.” Regarding Lowell’s recent contribution to this “ready market” in which
“Mr. Waley has achieved quite a success,” the reviewer allows, “Miss Lowell’s poetic gifts
are unquestioned, and her power of transfusing foreign material into something original
and pleasing to her accustomed audience must be equally great”; however, they find
themselves “dissatisfied” by the “queerness of the final result”:
One would think that the Chinese poet lived in a small egocentric world. Even Max
Stirner probably would not have uttered so many I’s in three lines, or the
distinguished Roosevelt either, at that. Now I do not consider this as a true
representation of Chinese poetry; I do not know that this is English poetry. And
then we do not see that Chinese poetry has any resemblance to free verse, except
possibly, if we stretch our imagination a little, a portion of what we call “ancient”
poetry. But Miss Lowell’s translation is in free verse throughout, as if she wishes to
prove that there were verse libréists in a foreign country considerably more than
ten centuries ago! This is no place to criticise the honourable movement in
American poetry. It is, at any rate a patriotic movement: it is 100 percent
Americanism…But what Miss Lowell has given us is Americanism even with a
vengeance: she discovers that the Chinese poets had long ago imbibed the spirit!290
290 “Review of Fir-Flower Tablets,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 17, no. 4 (1922): 351-352. The “ancient verse”
(gutishi 古体诗) referred to here is likely Han fu 汉赋, a panegyric form with resemblances to blank verse or
120
In a sense, the reviewer anticipates the dictum popularized after World War II, often
credited to Robert Frost, that “poetry is what is lost in translation,” and draws its line of
thought out to the logical conclusion. They conclude, “we are perfectly willing to grant
that parts of the translation are full of beauty; beauty, alas, of free verse, not of Chinese
poetry. The work is still of the pioneer sort, and the lack of any satisfactory guidance
accounts, I think, for what seem to a Chinese reader inexcusable crudities.”291
A reviewer of Lowell’s letters in 1946 describes Chinese Students’ Monthly, then defunct,
as “obscure.”292 Nonetheless, it held a singular role in the late 1910s and 1920s as a
magazine by and for its namesake audience of American-educated Chinese scholars. It was
anything but obscure to China-interested scholars and writers of the interwar period:
Dewey published opinion pieces in it and Bertrand Russell quoted from it in The Problem of
China.293 It also holds considerable significance for modernist Chinese literature: instigated
by a friendly literary feud with Hu Shi in 1917, Sophia Chen Hengzhe (Shafei Chen
Hengzhe莎菲 • 陈衡哲) published “One Day” (“Yi tian 一天”) in Chinese Students’ Monthly,
scooping Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji 狂人日记”) in the pages of New
Youth (La Jeneusse / Xin qingnian 新青年) by a full year as the first short story written in
prose poetry In English. In counterpoint, lü shi 律诗, or regulated poetry written after the seventh century, is
often called “modern style” poetry (jintishi 近体诗).
291 Ibid., 352.
292 Stewart Mitchell, “Review of Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell: Correspondence of a Friendship by
Harley Farnsworth MacNair,” The New England Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1946): 398–403.
293 Bertrand Russell, The Problem With China (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922),
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13940/13940-h/13940-h.htm.
121
vernacular Chinese.294 Certainly the magazine was anything but inconsequential to Lowell.
In a letter to Ayscough, she writes, “I am considerably wrought up over these things and
am awfully mad with the Chinese Students’ reviewer. It gave me a violent headache and a
sleepless night.”295 In her letter to the editor responding to the review—a practice she later
repeats in Poetry—she writes, “I wonder whether you think such writing is liable to
promote a pleasant feeling between our two countries.”296 It is curious in retrospect how
Lowell internalizes the review as an attack on her personally, given it is predicated upon the
inherent untranslatability of Chinese poetry into American free verse. On the other hand,
how could she not? Without elaboration, the reviewer charges Lowell with not only
lacking the euphony of the Chinese original, but moreover of “inexcusable crudities.” For
the moment, we will leave the reviewer’s static and essentialist understanding of Chinese
poetry unremarked upon; however, it would be amiss to not acknowledge their words
echo Shen Yue 沈约, the proverbial inventor of tonal prosody in 5th century China, who
writes, “Concerning whether or not a work has euphony, there is in addition the
difference between refinement and crudity (yun yu buyun, fu you jing cu 韵与不韵，复有精
粗).”297
294 Ming Di, “Re-Reading Hu Shi,” January 22, 2016,
https://www.poetryinternational.com/nl/poets-poems/article/104-27632_Re-reading-Hu-Shi.
295 Stewart Mitchell, “Review of Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell,” 188.
296 Qtd in Witter Bynner, “Tempest in a China Teapot,” in Prose Pieces, ed. James Kraft, The Works of Witter Bynner
(New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), 245.
297 Qtd in Meow Hui Goh, “Knowing Sound: Poetry and ‘Refinement’ in Early Medieval China,” Chinese
Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 31, no. December (2009): 63.
122
Tietjens, for her part, approached the Americanism of free verse poetry and the
place of Chinese poetry within it from another angle. In her two-part series in Poetry, she
wonders if modernist translation has been in some ways too successful: in its suggestion that
American modernism and classical Chinese poetics share an aesthetic correspondence, she
worries the modernist reader may have a false confidence in our understanding of an
aesthetic form and cultural context “so great as to be far beyond anything the West has ever
produced.”298 However, in the final analysis, her interests do not lay in the aporetic
condition of translation and other such theoretical problems which continue to preoccupy
scholars, but rather in a judgment of literary translation on the grounds of aesthetics itself,
which she understands as an experiential condition of “magic.” Bucking the consensus of
the time, she eschews British linguist and autodidact Arthur Waley’s seemingly
authoritative command of the Chinese translation market, arguing his “word sense,” “at
once so simple and so scholarly,” nonetheless “falls short of the ultimate subtlety of
magic.”299 On the other hand, Tietjens declares, “I for one cannot quite trust Miss Lowell.
She has given us so many racial interpretations–Japanese, Chinese, Indian and
others–which were all essentially herself, that when I find that [The Fir-flower Tablets] too
reads like her own poems I doubt their essentially Chinese quality. She has surely too vivid
a personality to make a good translator.”300 Rounding out the competition, she observes
that Pound does not identify his “airy snatches”301 of Chinese poetry in Cathay as proper
298 Tietjens, “On Translating Chinese Poetry: I,” 269.
299 Eunice Tietjens, “On Translating Chinese Poetry: II,” Poetry 20, no. 6 (September 1922): 330.
300 Ibid., 330–31.
301 Ibid., 330.
123
“translations,” and so chooses to accept this claim at face value.302 Having eliminated all
other contenders, Tietjens throws her hat in with Witter Bynner and his forthcoming
collaborative translations with the Chinese scholar and political figure Jiang Kanghu. She
pronounces, “Mr. Bynner’s book is not yet out, but from the examples I have seen it
promises to be the most satisfying of the free-verse translations in the matter of magic.”303
Waley and Bynner had a mutual appreciation for one another’s work, while Pound
by this time had already divested from Poetry due to Monroe’s ambivalence towards The
Cantos. The case of Tietjens, Bynner, and Lowell, however, was a different matter. Lowell’s
subsequent response to Tietjens ran in its entirely across seven pages in Poetry. In it, she
claims Tietjens’ account “allows propaganda to outrun discretion.” Among other things,
she accuses Tietjens of tearing her down so as to indirectly advocate for her sister, Louise
Hammond’s Chinese translations which ran concurrently in Poetry as Tietjens’ editorial.304
Years later, on the occasion of the publication of Lowell’s collected correspondences with
Ayscough, Bynner wrote a retrospective account of this and other clashes with Lowell,
calling them a “Tempest in a China Teacup.”305 Existing somewhere between a review and
an open letter, he explains, “Since many pages of the book discuss me, I feel it is only fair
302 Ibid., 331.
303 Ibid., 330–31.
304 Amy Lowell, “Miss Lowell on Translating Chinese,” Poetry 21, no. 3 (December 1922): 170.
305 Bynner’s refining of the phrase “tempest in a teacup” is redundant. The phrase originated in the British
aristocracy’s overly hasty dismissal of the nascent American revolution, epitomized then and still remembered
today by the Boston Tea Party, and was immortalized in Carl Gutenberg’s political cartoon
“Tea-Tax-Tempest” (1778). Given that England controlled the taxation of tea carried to the American
colonies from China, and that American clipper ships soon began running to China once the Revolutionary
War was won, it is safe to say that in the original phrasing China is already operative in the waters upon
which any such tempest rages. For a discussion of colonial America’s exchanges with China, see Jonathan
Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990).
124
to quote a few of the passages for better or worse.” Bynner assumes an amused, somewhat
disinterested position in the face of her acrimony–as when she writes, “It makes me so
angry to have him come out here and gallop through a T’ang anthology of three hundred
poems. He simply can’t do such a thing.”306 He contrasts Lowell’s “anxiety” to get
Fir-Flowered Tablets published before The Jade Mountain with his and Jiang’s gradualist approach:
Time and again in their letters both ladies seemed to think that I was in haste. I
venture in the light of 1946 to note that eight years after 1921, years of incessant
work, Dr. [Jiang] and I published The Jade Mountain and that twenty four years after
1921 with the generous help of Arthur Waley and others it was issued again, the
sixth edition revised and improved. The ladies really need not have hurried.307
Bynner takes note of how her pettiness towards him extends to his Chinese acquaintances,
as when she writes, “He throws round a lot of big names of people he met in China, such
as Dr. Hu [Shi]…Princess Der Ling [Lizzie Yu Deling 裕德龄]…Dr. [Gu Hongming辜鸿
铭]…According to Witter, all these people have greatly praised his work, which I can well
believe, for they know nothing of the English language.”308 Likewise, she is distrustful of
Jiang’s west-coast affiliations, given that he was recently appointed “in Berkeley, California,
and not in one of the older universities.”309 Bynner concludes, without elaboration, by
taking note of an incident involving Lowell and an unnamed “Chinese professor”:
she wrote to Mrs. Ayscough about a dismal attempt to enjoy an evening with a
Chinese professor whom she had bidden to her house. “I gave him a brief outline
in my letter of the kind of thing I wanted him to answer without mentioning any
306 Qtd. in Bynner, “Prose Pieces,” 244.
307 Qtd. in ibid., 245.
308 Qtd. in ibid., ellipses in original.
309 Qtd. in Bynner, “Prose Pieces.”
125
specific things. It seems to have given the gentleman’s feet chills…I do not find it
easy to understand these Chinamen; nor do they find it easy to understand me.”310
Such an exchange, at the heart of much twentieth-century translation from East Asian
languages and which was derided by Bynner in his own time, is described by Huang (in a
different context) as a “classic scene of anthropological fieldwork: an ethnographer asks
questions prepared from preconceived notions and waits for the narrative informant to fill
in the blanks.”311
Despite Bynner’s stated disinterest in Lowell’s tempestuousness towards him, his
own private correspondence with Tietjens reveals otherwise. In 1922, before the fall
publication of “Of Translating Chinese Poetry,” Tietjens and Bynner organized a literary
event themed around Chinese classical poetry, held at a Chinese restaurant in Chicago.
Continuing the ironic inversion of Eurocentric sensibilities gestured to in Profiles from China’s
狄 di—northern tribe or “barbarian,” she wishes to find a restaurant “as little westernized
as possible in this barbaric city.” Though she admits, “it seems a little cheap to dramatize
the poetry via the food route,” she hopes the effect of it “will get over twice as well,” and
that in any case “It ought to be a distinct change for these corn-fed authors.”312 At the
event, Bynner read and discussed his Chinese translations alongside Cai Tinggan 蔡廷干,
310 Qtd. in ibid., 245–56, ellipses in original.
311 Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 154. For an earlier discussion of Lowell by Huang, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement:
Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. (Oakland, California: University
of California Press, 2002), 93-112.
312 Eunice Tietjens to Witter Bynner, January 4, 1922, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 1, Folder 10, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Eunice Tietjens, “On Translating Chinese Poetry:
II,” Poetry 20, no. 6 (September 1922): 330. As discussed in the previous section, Tietjens’ respect for classical
Chinese poetry and culture is quite jarring when compared to her antipathy towards modern Chinese life.
Indeed, the aporia of China as both a theoretical idea and a historical contingency of America itself is one
which pervades the interwar period. In a certain sense, it runs straight to the heart of the theoretical construle
of the transpacific itself.
126
an admiral and career statesman educated in the United States in the 1870s who had
returned for a summit in Washington. Later, he had a brief career in retirement from
public service as professor of literature at Beijing and Tsinghua University, and Tietjens
would review his book of translations in Poetry.313 Although Cai Tinggan was by all
accounts well received, Tietjens wrote fawningly to Bynner, “you were the bright star of
the evening.”314
As it happens, Amy Lowell was invoked in the planning stages of this event as a
possible speaker. In a masterful stroke of equivocation, Bynner writes to Tietjens:
I hope you did not misunderstand me to mean that I would rather not have Amy
Lowell. The point is that I disagree with her considerably in approaching Chinese
poetry, and yet as a man have to be more considerate of my opponent than she
does as a lady. This misgiving, however, may be wholly a false one. We should
probably have an extremely interesting and enjoyable time of it.315
Given his later publication of “Tempest in a China Teacup,” such talk of gentlemanly
consideration ended up quite empty. Well before that, his tossed-off insult, circulated
313 Cai Tinggan was one of thirty Chinese boys who studied in the United States through Yung Wing 容闳’s
Chinese Educational Mission, which was ultimately aborted in 1881; see Thomas La Fargue, China’s First
Hundred (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1942). Cai’s Chinese Poems in English Rhyme (1933), which
Tietjens estimated to be the first book put out by a Chinese translator working alone, was a “surprisingly
good job.” She writes that the translations, “while few of them are magical, are exact and scholarly and quite
capable of passing on to us pleasure in the original.” Eunice Tietjens, “Review of Chinese Poems in English
Rhyme,” Poetry 42, no. 3 (June 1933): 174–75.
314 Eunice Tietjens to Witter Bynner, February 15, 1922, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 1, Folder 10, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
315 Witter Bynner to Eunice Tietjens, January 7, 1922, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box 4 Folder 186, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
127
widely by Pound, that Lowell was an overweight “hippopoetess” was certainly as petty as
anything Lowell ever directed towards him or Jiang.316
ii. The Jade Mountain
William Butler Yeats observed, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” But what of the quarrels with others about poetry?
Though this period saw the emergence of many would-be translators banging their heads
against Chinese poems, attempting to crack them open and reveal the prosodic secrets
within, it also marks the emergence of the modernist quarrels over how best to do so.
Indeed, this juxtapositional pairing of Poetry and Lowell–here Tietjens, but more commonly
Pound–continues to be reflected in contemporary scholarship.317 In short, it is not too
much of an exaggeration to remark that Poetry is for reading, but Chinese poetry is for
fighting. Eliot Weinberger kept the pugilistic spirit of the interwar modernists alive in 19
Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.318 A classic of translation studies, Weinberger’s slim volume pits
different translations of Wang Wei’s “Lu Zhai 鹿寨” against one another in a
no-holds-barred battle royale. Evaluating Bynner’s effort, titled, “Deer-Park Hermitage,”
316 Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, Amy Lowell, American Modern (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2004), 171.
317 See, for example, Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 93; see also Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American
Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity, Global Asias (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
318 Wang Wei, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Mount
Kisco, N.Y: Moyer Bell, 1987). The title of the collection is a direct reference to Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird.” Qian discusses “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as part of a larger “modernist
response to Chinese art” in the work of see Pound, Marianne Moore, and Stevens (The Modernist Response to
Chinese Art (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
128
Weinberger accuses him of being “a primary purveyor of Chinoiserie translation in the
1920’s” and likens the poem to “a haze of opium” and the redolence of “the mystical,
inscrutable Fu Manchu East.” His critique is topped off with a brilliantly backhanded
compliment: at least Bynner is “not as extreme an exoticist as his imagist counterparts,
Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough.”319 Of course, Bynner did not execute the translation
unilaterally. Unmentioned in Weinberger’s opprobrium is any mention of Jiang Kanghu,
whose work on this poem as part of The Jade Mountain marks the first book-length
collaboration between an American modernist poet and Chinese scholar. Jiang’s name
appears paratextually alongside Bynner in the poem’s attribution, but nowhere else in
Weinberger’s commentary. The oversight is representative of how Jiang is repeatedly
omitted from discussion of The Jade Mountain. It is also convenient: much more troublesome
for Weinberger to equate the ellipses at the end of a line of poetry to “a haze of opium” if
he were to also acknowledge a Chinese author’s contributions to that line.
Let us return to T.S. Eliot’s claim that Pound invented China for “our time” with the
publication of Cathay. Approaching it from a cultural position, Eric Hayot observes, “Cathay
does not provide an indisputable date for when ‘our time’ began,” but “it does indicate
when its fate came to be understood in terms of a certain relationship to China and to
things Chinese.”320 As we have seen in the first chapter, this “certain relationship” in fact
precedes Cathay in the case of Monroe and her “birth of an idea” for Poetry magazine; yet
Pound’s short collection of translations of Tang-dynasty poems marks a critical turning
point, where China becomes operative in American poetry not only in its “oriental
319 Ibid., 10–11.
320 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (2004; repr., Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2011), 8.
129
manner” but also its preoccupation with Chinese translation. Reflecting on the lasting
impact of this “certain relationship,” Steven Yao writes, “Pound’s Cathay stands as the
formative event not only for such roughly contemporaneous feats of collaborative
translation, specifically of Chinese poetry, as Fir Flower Tablets (1921) by Amy Lowell and
Florence Ayscough and The Jade Mountain (1929) by Witter Bynner and [Jiang Kanghu], but
also more generally for the current approach to the rendering of other languages into
English.”321 If we follow Yao, Pound’s inauguration of modernist translation of Chinese
poetry is interchangeable with the advent of modernist and contemporary English literary
translation itself. Yet he also reminds us that this “certain relationship” emerged through
the collective efforts of figures such as Lowell, Ayscough, Bynner, and Jiang, rather than
Pound in isolation.
Tietjens and Lowell attest to how Jiang was acknowledged in his own time as a
co-contributor to The Jade Mountain. Yet as we have seen with Weinberger, he and other
Sino-US figures remain largely omitted from subsequent modernist scholarship, Yao’s
citation of Jiang above being one of a scanty few exceptions which prove the rule.
Following Lawrence Venuti’s observation of the translator’s invisibility in American letters,
this omission from the record of American modernism is perhaps best described as a
condition of “Sino-US invisibility” in American modernism: invisible Sino-US scholars,
invisible Sino-US translators, invisible Sino-US poetics.322 As such, it is worth relating the
circumstances which lead to Bynner and Jiang’s collaboration. Bynner met Jiang during his
1918-1919 teaching appointment at University of California. Bynner had recently returned
321 Yao, Foreign Accents, 32.
322 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2008).
130
from his travels in Japan and China, and he fashioned his apartment hotel room near the
Berkeley campus after a Japanese teahouse. However, rather than the refined Japanese Tea
Garden of Golden Gate Park, which was commissioned for the 1894 World’s Fair, Bynner’s
facsimile ran somewhat closer to the demimonde historically associated with Tokyo’s
Yoshiwara pleasure district. Reports began to swirl of riotous parties where undergraduates
were supplied with alcohol. (In comparison, Pound’s hagiographic dismissal from his
position at Wabash College roughly a decade earlier, for allowing a “homeless” woman to
stay the night in his quarters, comes off as rather tame.) Bynner’s pedagogical approach
proved equally unconventional: anticipating the Iowa Writer’s Workshop model which
flourished after World War II, he gathered the students in his poetry class each week on the
campus lawn, circulated their poems anonymously, and had the class conduct cold reading
critiques of each other’s work.323 When the English department did not renew his contract,
the “Halcyon Society” poetry club which he had established at Berkeley awarded him the
festschrift WB in California.324 Among the nineteen “charter and honorary members” of the
club who contributed to the publication were, in descending order of academic seniority,
Jiang Kanghu, Stella Benson, Genevieve Taggard, Hildegarde Flanner, Moon Kwan, and
Idella Purnell. All of them went on to publish in Poetry, many through the auspices of
323 Witter Bynner, “On Teaching the Young Laurel to Shoot,” in The Works of Witter Bynner: Prose Pieces, ed. James
Kraft (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 366–72; see also Witter Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner:
Selected Letters, ed. James Kraft (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 66–69.
324 Witter Bynner, W.B. In California Bynner: A Tribute (Berkeley, CA: Privately printed, 1919). It is tempting to
identify Bynner’s sexual orientation as a catalyst for his dismissal from Berkeley, and it would be wise to not
entirely rule it out. However, by all accounts Bynner was circumspect concerning his sexual relations,
following what his biographer calls “a code of public conformity and private honesty.” In a letter to Robert
Hunt, his future partner who had recently come out to his parents, Bynner writes, “I fear lest your windy
impulses may blow you into regrettable candors, candors which can only cause you eventual discomfort.
Hold back, old dear. This is not advice to be cowardly–it’s advice toward wise, unharassed happiness. Don’t
indulge your sudden fevers for sensation. Be square with yourself. Accept the liking of those who like you.
Like those you like. And to hell with the rest. Am I right?” (Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters,
119).
131
Bynner himself.325 These dueling aspects of Bynner’s life and work went hand and hand,
aptly dramatized in two photographs: one, hosted on “the Hidden History of the Berkeley
Campus,” a website which documents “the history of sexual minorities at Cal,” portrays
Bynner as a bohemian provocateur adorned in a Japanese kimono326; the other, the
frontispiece of an edited collection of his Chinese Translations, depicts him as bespectacled and
professorial, seated next to Jiang as the two pore over a text.327
Dorothy Wang identifies Moon Kwan’s poem “To Witter Bynner” in W.B. in
California as the earliest example of Chinese American poetry in English.328 Contestation
around what should be properly identified as Asian American literature notwithstanding, it
is worthy of note that two poems by Jiang appear in the same valedictory collection: one
which he wrote in Chinese and translated into English, and one which he wrote in English
and translated into Chinese. Jiang thus shares with Kwan the distinction of earliest
American publication in English by a poet of Chinese heritage; moreover, as far as research
indicates, Jiang should be credited with the first literary English translation of Chinese
poetry by a Chinese poet or scholar. The pair came from different socioeconomic
circumstances and family backgrounds: Jiang from a well-established scholar-official family
in Jiangxi province near Shanghai, Moon Kwan from humbler roots in Guangzhou. Yet
325 University of California Chronicle (University of California Press, 1920), 19.
326 William Benemann, “The Carlton Hotel,” Gay Bears: The Hidden History of the Berkeley Campus, 2002,
https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/gaybears/bynner/links/carlton_hotel.html.
327 Witter Bynner, The Chinese Translations, ed. James Kraft, The Works of Witter Bynner (New York: Farrar,
Strauss, Giroux, 1979).
328 Dorothy Wang, “Asian American Poetry and the Politics of Form,” in The Cambridge History of Asian American
Literature, ed. Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 438.
132
their respective orbits came together by way of Bynner and the wider circle of bohemian
artists of the California coast. In a letter to Max Eastman, the silent film actress Florence
Deshon describes a “Chinese professor from San Francisco” of Jiang’s description
assembling a tour group to China for that summer. In the same letter, she relates an
anecdote this professor told of “a wonderful dowager Empress that became bored, so she
pushed her son off the throne, and ascended it herself. She conquered other countries and
was a great Empress, no man could apply for a position in the Court unless he qualified as a
poet.” The editors of Deshon’s letters identify the empress as Empress Dowager Cixi (Cixi
Taihou 慈禧太后), though the details more accurately describe Tang-dynasty Empress Wu
Zetian 武则天. Deshon continues: “Moon-huan [sic] who is very child like in some ways,
doesn’t like her because she had many love affairs.”329
If Chinese civilizational power had an especial appeal to modernists due to the
perception of poetry’s historical prominence in Chinese education and culture, then the
claim that one had to be “qualified as a poet” to attain a position at the Tang court of Wu
Zetian reinforces what Stephen Owen calls “the myth of the High T’ang as the apogee of
poetry and medieval civilization.”330 Weinberger likewise describes English translation of
classical Chinese poetry as a “prevailing T’angophilia,” observing that any discussion of
“Chinese poetry” was more often than not directed toward Tang poetry specifically.331
329 Cooper Graham and Cristoph Irmscher, Love and Loss in Hollywood: Florence Deshon, Max Eastman, and Charlie Chaplin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 231.
330 Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang (New Haven/London: Yale University Press,
1981), 170.
331 Eliot Weinberger, “Excerpts from the Introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese
Poetry,” no. 23 (August 2003), http://jacketmagazine.com/23/rex-weinb.html.
133
Bynner and Jiang likewise decided to collaborate on a translation project which would “be
the first complete Chinese verse classic, as far as [Jiang] knows, translated into English”:
the Tangshi sanbaishou 唐诗三百首, or Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, an anthology
compiled in the 18th century by the Qing-dynasty scholar Sun Zhu 孙洙 under the pen
name Hengtang Tuishi 蘅塘退士.332
Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems had yet to appear, and Bynner reports other translation
attempts “had not held what I wanted”; moreover, Bynner and Jiang were motivated by a
desire to pair Pound’s free verse approach to translation with the rigor of scholarly research.
Bynner was inspired by Jiang’s ability to recite Cathay’s Chinese source poems, improvising
English translations on the spot “still finer” than Pound’s. He recalls,
Ezra Pound’s small sheaf, Cathay, printed in London three years before, contained
passages arrestingly fine, as well as prophetic of Waley’s direct manner; but [Jiang],
wondering why the American poet should call Li Po only by his Japanese name,
Rihaku, recited off-hand versions of the same poems Pound had chosen, which I
found, even in [Jiang’s] halting English, still finer.333
In the summer of 1920, Jiang and Bynner traveled to China with plans to gather materials
and begin work in earnest. In a letter to Carl Sandburg in anticipation of the trip, Bynner
writes, “I relish showing up the merely literary translators, who give us only the language
of a limbo between East and West, and are ensnared by what they think picturesque,
colorful, novel, instead of trying to bring over the living simplicity and directness of those
332 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 69.
333 Witter Bynner, “Remembering a Gentle Scholar,” in The Selected Witter Bynner, ed. James Kraft (Albuquerque,
NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 228.
134
old poets.”334 Through a series of missed connections, Bynner and Jiang spent much of
their time separated from one another. When his traveling companion Arthur Davison
Ficke decamped to the expatriate community in the nearby villas of Moganshan to escape
the sweltering summer heat, Bynner initially demurred and stayed behind in Hangzhou,
once described by Marco Polo as “without a doubt the best and the noblest city in the
world.”335 He writes:
I had moved to a native hotel and, consumed with heat and mosquitoes and unable
to sleep much on the bed of slung matting, was physically miserable. Fortunately I
like the food and, clad in only a long linen Chinese coat, ate it on my own
picturesque little balcony–ardently companioned by two Chinese students of
twenty who had come to my rescue with a little English on the roof the [Hangzhou]
hotel, where I was listening, my first night there, to some singsong girls. The two
likable lads were with me after that from dawn to eve, my guides, my bargainers,
my friends.336
That fall Bynner and Jiang briefly reunited (meeting “by accident on a Shanghai street”)
before going their separate ways again. During their time apart, Bynner had been working
diligently on the literal trots with which Jiang had supplied him, and they finally settled in
for a more extended period of “intensive work” together that winter in Beijing. In the
spring of 2021 Bynner returned to the United States, and the pair continued their
incremental work by mail throughout the 1920s. They finally published The Jade Mountain,
after many delays, in 1929.337
334 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 73.
335 See Marco Polo, The Description of the World, 133.
336 Ibid., 74.
337 Bynner, “Remembering a Gentle Scholar,” 228–29; Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 79.
135
Kaiser Kuo uses the phrase “feral Sinologist” to describe foreigners who gain
knowledge of China through a holistic, boots-on-the-ground approach–particularly in
contrast with what he laments as the increasingly narrow specialization of contemporary
Chinese area studies.338 As opposed to other figures such as Agnes Smedley or Jack Belden,
whose vocational interests lay in reportage or political advocacy, Bynner’s engagement
with China was first and foremost aesthetic, manifesting in his appreciation of travel,
nature, and Chinese poetry.339 He describes “Wandering through out-of-the-way places in
China, following at [West Lake in Hangzhou] and up through the Yangtze Gorges the very
footsteps of the poets in whose work I was engrossed,” “overlooking a landscape the like
of which I had never seen from any dwelling on earth. There were Sung mountain
paintings glimmering from our peak all the way to the Himalayas…And just as that
landscape moved and breathed, so do the Chinese poems from line to line. And just as man
becomes natural and simple in a presence like that, so did the Chinese poets.”340 Bynner’s
vernacular experience in China is reflected in his initial self-professed ignorance of standard
western transliteration. He recalls,
I learned that shan means mountain and that shuêi means water and that shan-shuêi
means landscape. I learned that “mountain-water” paintings lack sometimes the
mountain and sometimes the water, and I learned to translate the word as landscape.
I am not even sure how to spell the word for water. I am spelling it as it sounded
when I added to it the word for hot, which I herewith avoid spelling, and
338 Kaiser Kuo, “The World According To Jeremy Goldkorn,” Sinica Podcast, August 19, 2019,
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sinica-podcast/id1121407665.
339 For a discussion of Agnes Smedley’s role in advocating for what Richard So calls a proletarian “coolie
democracy” in China, see Richard Jean So, “Coolie Democracy: U.S.-China Political and Literary Exchange,
1925-1955” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2010).
340 “Translating Chinese Poetry,” in The Selected Witter Bynner, ed. James Kraft (Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, 1995), 196, 190.
136
summoned, according to a middle or an upper gesture, a hand-basin or a pot of
tea.341
Despite learning “to ask in several dialects for a few necessaries,” as in the foregoing
example, Bynner stresses he “is a very far cry from being able to read”; yet he downplays
this shortcoming by playing up the diglossia of literary and vernacular Chinese, estimating,
“had I learned Chinese, I should not have fared much better as a translator. I am assured
that not even foreigners born in China and knowing the language from childhood are safe
guides when it comes to Chinese poetry.”342 Moreover, he reminds that translation is also
inherently interpretation, and “The Chinese themselves vary in their interpretations–not in
a way that conflicts with basic and essential clarity, but in one that is only natural,
considering the absence from the poems of such grammatical details as present, tense and
number.”343
Among the figures whose interpretations he consulted during his time in China
were Hu Shi, whom Bynner describes as “an influential young modernist of Peking
Government University and author of widely read poems in the so-called ‘vulgar tongue,’”
and as a “patient listener” to his translations; Princess Der Ling, “former lady-in-waiting to
the Empress Dowager” and friend of Lucy Calhoun, who would recite with Bynner
“instantaneous translations of the poems, which she knew by heart”; and Nieh Shih-chang,
“the young student and friend” with whom he crossed paths on an ocean liner en-route to
China, and who subsequently “piloted” him on his trip, “constantly reading the poems
341 Ibid., 196.
342 Ibid., 196. Lowell reads this sentiment as, “of course, an attempt to cut the ground under [Ayscough’s]
feet”; see “Tempest in a China Teapot,” 244-245.
343 Ibid., 196.
137
and making helpful suggestions.”344 All of them appear in the acknowledgments for The
Jade Mountain.345 However, in the final analysis Bynner invariably deferred to Jiang:
[Jiang] would make sure that I knew the literal meaning of the successive characters,
explain his own preference, give me sometimes my choice of the various
interpretations, or even let me make one of my own. It is due him, for better or
worse, to say that I generally chose his.346
Bynner also crossed paths during his travels in China with John Dewey,347 though their
interactions were mainly limited to parties and other social functions. Decades later, in
1948, Bynner and his partner Robert Hunt would spend Christmas and New Year’s as a
guest at Dewey’s home in Key West.348 A figure of more direct consequence for Bynner
was Gu Hongming 辜鸿铭, an idiosyncratic, biracial, western-educated Confucian
anti-reformist who came of age in the late Qing. From Bynner’s conversations with Gu in
Beijing, during which Gu often recited passages from his essay The Spirit of the Chinese People,
Bynner developed an understanding of Chinese culture as a “spirit of perpetual youth.”
According to Gu, this spirit is the “working together in harmony of the heart and
344 Bynner, “Translating Chinese Poetry”, 196-197; After Bynner‘s return to the United States he continued
to correspond with Nieh throughout the 1920s. Nearly sixty of Nieh’s letters to Bynner are housed at Harvard.
See “Nieh, Craig Shih-Chang. 58 Letters; 1920-1930 & [n.d.]., 1920-1930,” n.d., Witter Bynner Papers,
Hollis Archives, Harvard University Library, https://hollisarchives.lib.Harvard.edu/repositories/archival_objects/513407.
345 Hengtang Tuishi, ed., The Jade Mountain, trans. Witter Bynner and Jiang Kanghu (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1929), 278.
346 Bynner, “Translating Chinese Poetry,” 197.
347 Hu Shi served as Dewey’s official interpreter and personal confidante on Dewey’s lecture tour, and Dewey
makes thinly veiled references to Hu Shi in his writing on China. One article, for example, begins with a
description of “A Chinese friend, to whom I owe so much that he would be justified in arresting me for
intellectual theft.” (John Dewey, Anne S Sharpe, and Carl Cohen, “New Culture in China,” in The Middle Works,
1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 13 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983),
108)
348 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 195–96.
138
head….this happy union of soul with intellect.”349 Bynner identifies this quality in Chinese
poetry as a medium where the beauty of direct expression and the simplicity of the human
spirit coincide. This union renders Tang poems as “valid and universal” in their capability
of “uttering beauty,” as Chinese poets are “able enough and sure enough to make the
ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.”350 Such cases for Bynner account for
“the continuation of poetry as a live factor among [Gu Hongming’s] people,” as well as
enthusiasm for the verse among American modernists.351 Concluding one of several essays
on translation and Chinese poetry, Bynner elaborates on this indelible relationship between
the human spirit and poetry’s “spirit of beauty”:
Before there can be political equity in the world, there must be human equity, an
end of racial ignorance and snobbery on all sides, an end of the superstition that
superficial differences of skin and mold mean fundamental differences of mind and
spirit. East and West, there is only one human spirit in the world, though knaves
and fools would keep it divided. And it is the nearest thing we know to what we
confidently call the divine spirit. At its best it is the spirit of beauty, whether in
nature, in art or in the conduct of man. And still, through the centuries, the poets
are its heralds.352
Can one translate in such a way that it leaves the “human spirit” intact? And can
such an approach, bordering on nineteenth century idealism, be identified as modernist? In
1922, a portfolio of Bynner and Jiang’s translations of the Tang poet Wang Wei 王维
349 Hongming Gu, The Spirit of the Chinese People (Beijing, China: The Peking Daily News, 1915), 13,
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_Spirit_of_the_Chinese_People.djv.
350 Witter Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” Poetry 19, no. 5 (1922): 277; Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain,
xvii.
351 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, xv.
352 Bynner, “Translating Chinese Poetry,” 198.
139
appeared in Poetry. In an accompanying essay, Bynner explains a method of dynamic
translation which attempts to leave intact the “beautiful,” “universal,” and “ultimately
exact” qualities of Wang Wei’s verse: “Translating the work of Wang Wei and others in the
Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, Dr. [Jiang] and I have tried constantly to
transfer the Chinese idiom into an equivalent idiom in English, rather than to stress the
local novelty and pungency of Chinese phrasing.”353 This orientation towards concrete,
immediate language is reiterated in Bynner’s introduction to The Jade Mountain–as is his
accrediting of the translations to a collective effort between Jiang and himself: “There have
been frequent instances in this volume where Dr. [Jiang] and I have discussed several
possible meanings of a poem and have chosen for translation into the more definite
language the meaning we preferred.”354 Though Bynner’s approach superficially resembles
Pound’s imagist clarion call to go in fear of abstraction, it explicitly differs from Cathay,
which Venuti identifies as an explicit foreignization of the source text which renders the
act of translation visible. Throughout the collection, Pound idiosyncratically employs
Japanese transliteration of Chinese places and poets, identifying Wang Wei and Li Bai 李白
respectively as “Omikatsu” and “Rihaku”–figures accurately identified by their Chinese
names elsewhere in his work. Though this practice earns skepticism from Jiang, Bynner,
and Waley alike, it also results in a wholesale creation and indexicality of poetic
transmission, grounded in his autodidactic study of the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa.
Rather than transcreative foreignization, Bynner and Jiang favor a middle way between
353 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 277–78.
354 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, xviii.
140
Pound’s ideogrammatic method and Lowell and Ayscough’s florid, attenuated verse.355
One example is the persistent appearance of ellipses throughout The Jade Mountain–what
Weinberger misreads as Bynner blowing a lot of opium smoke. They are a typographical
invention of the translators and do not appear in Hengtuishi’s anthology. (For that matter,
neither do English conventions such as commas, periods, capitalization, or even line
breaks.) Rather than denoting an imprecise, “hazy” translation, they do the exact opposite,
marking a distinct change in subject, voice, or line of thought in the original poem without
additional explanatory verbiage. See, for example, the ellipses which comes at the end of
the third line of the Wei Yingwu 韦应物 jueju 绝句 quatrain, “An Autumn Night
Message”:
As I walk in the cool of the autumn night,
Thinking of you, singing my poem,
I hear a mountain pine-cone fall. . . .
You also seem to be awake.356
Ellipses thus serve as cues to the reader, providing visual, semantic transitions between
otherwise juxtaposing or paratactic elements–quintessential modernist techniques
commonly eschewed in Bynner’s own, relatively conservative verse. In one sense, The Jade
Mountain’s elaborated punctuation suggests Chinese prosody, in a western context, was too
modern for Bynner–particularly in light of subsequent translators such as Kenneth Rexroth
and Gary Snyder, who sought to amplify, rather than soften the contrastive elements found
in the original. In another sense, as with Pound, it is through Chinese poetry translation that
Bynner lets go of his residual prosodic habits and becomes modern. Notably, within
355 Setting both Pound and Lowell in his sights, Bynner writes, “It would be as erroneous to overemphasize
the component radicals of a Chinese character as to overemphasize the component meanings of such words
in English as day break, breakfast, nightfall or landscape.” Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 278.
356 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, 306.
141
modernist studies Bynner is best remembered as the perpetrator of the “Spectra Poets”
hoax, where he and Ficke, under the assumed names Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish,
published modernist free verse pastiche in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others magazine.357 Rather
than a fleeting amusement or mask of alterity, Bynner’s involvement with China and
Chinese aesthetics became integral to his work and identity.
Bynner and Jiang’s hybrid domestication of Chinese poetry proved an immediate
success. Bynner’s interest in presenting Tang poetry as “valid and universal in uttering
beauty” combines with Jiang’s scholarly precision in a text which is both accessible and
copiously annotated, rendered in free verse but stressing fluidity (a pairing in this time as
likely to be considered at odds with one another than as concordant).358 Throughout the
1920s, selections from Jade Mountain ran in an astonishingly comprehensive array of venues:
The Freeman, Asia, The Nation, Poetry, The New York Evening Post, The New Republic, The Dial, The China
Review, The Double Dealer, The Fugitive, The Harvard Advocate, The Little Review, The New Orient, and The
Smart Set, among others.359 In sum, ninety-percent of the poems from the collection, 278
poems in all, first appeared in magazines and journals, and a second printing was ordered
for the book even before its initial release. Jiang parleyed its success into a job hire,
becoming head of McGill’s new department of Chinese Studies, and the first Asian scholar
to head a university department in Canada. However, his fortunes turned during World
War II due to his collaboration of a different kind: serving as China’s Minister of Education
357 See Churchill, Suzanne, “The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917,” in Little Magazines &
Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne Churchill (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 177–97.
358 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 277; see also their respective introductions in Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade
Mountain, xiii-xix, xxi-xxxvii, passim.
359 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, 278.
142
in Wang Jingwei 汪精卫’s wartime puppet government under Japanese occupation. He
met his end while imprisoned, first by the Nationalist Guomindang 国民党 and afterwards
by the Communist Zhongguo Gongchandang 中国共产党. Bynner remained in contact with
Jiang’s family and dutifully forwarded to them in China half of all royalties he received for
The Jade Mountain, providing them with a critical source of income.360 As for Bynner, his
evangelistic tendencies towards Chinese civilization were married to contemporary civic
causes in the run-up to America’s entrance into the Pacific theatre in support of China. He
served as the New Mexico state chairman for the United China Relief, publicizing
fundraising events and raising awareness through exhibitions of paintings he acquired in
China and his own lectures on Chinese poetry and culture.361
The Jade Mountain remains the only complete English translation of the Tangshi sanbaishou.
It continues to be valued for its pedagogical worth, despite occasional inaccuracies in light
of later scholarship,362 and a number of poems from it appear in a recent anthology of
Tang and Song poetry edited by Michael Fuller.363 Alongside the later Robert Payne,
Bynner and Jiang are the only non-contemporary translators who make the cut among
Fuller’s selections. Despite this, their translations have hardly been considered “valid and
universal” within American modernist scholarship. In contrast with Fuller, Weinberger
eschews their translations in his editorialship of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese
360 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 68–69.
361 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 168–70.
362 See Burton Watson’s introduction to The Jade Mountain in The Chinese Translations, 17-18.
363 Michael Fuller, ed., An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017).
143
Poetry, opting instead for translations from the likes of Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary
Snyder, and David Hinton.364 Their inclusion, and Bynner and Jiang’s absence, can be
attributed equally to publishing permissions as much as critical judgment: all of the poems
curated by Weinberger were previously published by New Directions; The Jade Mountain,
meanwhile, was put out by Knopf, Bynner’s primary publisher. Yet Bynner’s Asian
affectations, both on and off the page, position him as a direct forerunner to Rexroth and
Snyder, post-World War II poets with ties to the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance and the
Beats, and whose translations of “Lu zhai” in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei are called out for
particular praise by Weinberger. A conceptualization of a “Pound-to-Rexroth” model of
American modernism’s engagement with China which takes Weinberger’s anthology as
gospel thus not only omits Bynner from the historical record but Jiang as well–along with
the participation of Sino-U.S. translators in interwar American modernism as a whole. A
recent example of this Pound-to-Rexroth model can be seen in Lucas Klein’s The Organization
of Distance. Klein identifies two distinct trajectories of literary translation in
twentieth-century American poetry: the literary model, represented by the Chinese
translations of Pound, Rexroth, and Snyder, and the scholarly anthology model, which he
locates in Harold Acton and Shixiang Chen’s Modern Chinese Poetry (1936) and Robert Payne’s
Contemporary Chinese Poetry (1947).365
Robert Kern identifies a separate genealogy of modernist poetry, one which
approaches translation through “readability,” and which includes both Rexroth and Bynner,
364 Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New York: New Directions, 2003).
365 Lucas Klein, The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (New York: Brill, 2018), 1–6, 25–28.
144
the previous serving under the latter as his protege.366 Indeed, Rexroth’s interest in the
Chinese poet Du Fu 杜甫 was instigated by a pilgrimage to see Bynner at his house in
Taos, New Mexico in 1924.367 In contrast to “the bareness and autonomy of Chinese
characters” in classical poetry, Kern describes Bynner’s translations as “often limpid free
verse” achieved by “a luxurious flow of speech that owes more to English lyric traditions
than to Chinese poetry,” and which constitutes “an alien imposition upon the original
structure of the Chinese text.”368 (Jiang’s role as collaborator on the translation is never
discussed.) The poem which Kern selects to exemplify this “imposition” is “A
Night-Mooring near Maple Bridge,” a translation of Zhang Ji 张继’s “Fengqiao Yepo 枫桥夜
泊” which appears as the second poem in The Jade Mountain:
While I watch the moon go down, a crow caws through the frost;
Under the shadow of maple-trees a fisherman moves with his torch;
And I hear, from beyond Su-chou, from the temple on Cold Mountain,
Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell.369
Kern takes note of the translation’s primary intervention–“the speaker’s arresting and
almost fastidious location of himself in the scene”–which successfully adapts into first
366 Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
244.
367 Kern assesses that Bynner was an even more formative influence on Rexroth’s lifelong interest in East
Asian poetry than Cathay. In 1924, at the age of eighteen, Rexroth traveled to Santa Fe to meet Bynner. Kern
writes, “He introduced Rexroth to ‘the major Sinologists in French and English’ and he encouraged him to
shift his focus from [Li Bai] to [Du Fu], who would become, as Rexroth asserts, the major influence on his
own poetry” (Ibid., 243).
368 Ibid., 244.
369 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, 4.
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person perspective the source poem’s floating third person perspective.370 In the original,
the effect is reminiscent of a landscape executed in aerial perspective, which also locates the
artist somewhere within it. James Liu identifies such a perspective, often found in Tang
poetry, as one which “juxtaposes the cosmic perspective of time with the personal.”371
However, what Kern actually takes issue with as an “alien imposition” is not this change in
perspective, but instead the translation’s “long and elaborate” use of prepositional phrases
and “words such as ‘while,’ ‘under,’ ‘from,’ and ‘here,’ which are rarely directly
represented in Chinese.”372 As with much of Kern concerning Chinese poetry and
translation, the statement is generally true–provided we take “Chinese” to mean literary
Chinese verse, totum pro parte, and not Chinese language–yet is not necessarily accurate in
this specific case. As it happens, directional particles appear in three of the source poem’s
four lines. Wai 外, meaning outside or beyond, is quite straightforward in its usage in the
third line: “Outside Gusu city, Hanshan Temple” (姑苏城外寒山寺 Gusucheng wai hanshan
shi). Gusu was a district of Suzhou 苏州 (rendered above as Su-chou), a major city in
Jiangsu 江苏 province, and Hanshan literally means “Cold Mountain.” Bynner and Jiang’s
decisions to identify “Gusu” with the more identifiable, contemporary city, and to literally
translate Hanshan attest to their preference for limpid readability.373 The other two
370 Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 244.
371 James J.Y. Liu, “Time, Space, and Self in Chinese Poetry,” CLEAR: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 1, no.
2 (1979): 148–49.
372 Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 244.
373 In contrast, Pound insists upon using opaque Japanese transliteration of Chinese place names in “The
River-Merchant’s Wife,” even when a literal translation would lead evocative, concrete results. For example,
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particles, “dui 对” and “dao 到,” are much more implicit and ambiguous in the poem,
demanding interpretive choices to be made for their respective lines if the English
translation is to retain the content of the source text while also making grammatical
sense.374
Another key work of criticism which discusses The Jade Mountain without attributing
Jiang is Ming Xie’s Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry. Xie not only omits Jiang from
his critical commentary, but moreover fails to credit him in the monograph’s bibliographic
citations.375 Like “orientalism” in Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and Modernism, the
“appropriation” of Xie’s title belies an even-handed, multivalenced reading of flows of
exchange between American and Chinese translators, poets, and commentators.376
Describing the early decades of Anglo-American modernism as “The Age of Chinese
Translation,” he lays out his primary argument: “In the process of poetic translation and
assimilation it is possible now, retrospectively, to recognize how these Anglo-American
writers had construed and appropriated certain aspects of classical Chinese poetry
according to their own preconceptions and creative needs.”377 His project is equally
“Long Wind Sand” (Changfengsha 长风沙), described in Fenollosa’s notes as “a port on the [Changjiang
River],” appears as “Cho-fu-Sa.” Pound, Cathay, 33-34, 81.
374 A literal trot of the poem reads: “moon set–crow cry–frost–full sky / river maple–fishing lights (on boats),
dui particle, sorrow sleep / Gusu city, outside, Hanshan temple / midnight bell–sound, daoparticle, traveler’s
boat. 月落乌啼霜满天江枫渔火对愁眠。姑苏城外寒山寺夜半钟声到客船。yueluo wu ti shuang mantian / jiang
feng yuhuo dui chou mian / Gusucheng wai Hanshansi / Yeban zhongsheng dao kechuan.”
375 Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (1999; repr., New York:
Routledge, 2014).
376 Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995).
377 Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism, 3.
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invested in revealing how, “when the results of such translation or adaptation are
successful English poems in their own right,” these transcreative texts instantiate “an
invisible tradition and establish for the Western reader a particular mode of poetic
perception and canon of composition” that is understood as equivalent and
interchangeable with Chinese poetics.378 In this regard, Xie superficially resembles Venuti,
who argues that English translation’s historical displacement of the source text not only
conceals the labor and creativity performed by translation, but in doing so also establishes
false notions of fidelity to the original text against which subsequent translations are
measured.379 At the same time, Xie’s approach of analyzing English translations “against
the evidence” of the Chinese source text is one which regards Chinese poetry in English as
fundamentally misinterpretation, whereby Chinese poems are falsely treated as “isolated
fragments that could be floated free of their anchorage in poetic and historical
conventions.”380 Though Xie primary focuses on Pound, Lowell, and Waley, Bynner
intermittently appears on the periphery of his analysis. At particular issue for Xie is
Bynner’s claims of “realism” in Tang poetry. Xie observes:
What is considered “romantic” in Chinese terms may just well be “classical” or
“realistic” by Western standards; what is merely “straightforward” in Chinese
could well be “suggestive” to a Western reader. Witter Bynner, for example, once
accused Ayscough and Lowell of being over-exuberant in their Fir-Flower Tablets and
believed that the Chinese poets were “realists” whereas Ayscough and Lowell were
“romantics” who “never realized that the exactly fitting connection of
commonplace words could make poetry.”381
378 Ibid., 3–4.
379 Lawrence Venuti, Theses on Translation An Organon for the Current Moment (New York: Flugschriften, 2019).
380 Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism, 216.
381 Ibid., 211.
148
Xie’s interest in deconstructing Bynner’s claims of “realism” follows the general
historicizing thrust of Tang scholarship in the United States in the wake of Stephen Owen.
Owen discusses how Tang poetry, regarded in its own time as a highly crafted, socially
important aesthetic form, came to be associated with self-evident, transparent historical
and autobiographical accuracy and “a ‘realism’ that attended writing from direct
experience.”382 In one instance, for example, he reads Li Bai’s poetics as “idealized
situations, conventional figures in a schematized scene” which is fundamentally
incompatible with claims of “realism,” regardless of whether the poem also depicts “some
aspect of everyday life that most poets ignored.”383 Xie provides an example concordant
with Owen’s argument:
Po Chu-i [Bai Juyi 白居易]’s “Lazy Man’s Song” as translated by Waley may
perhaps fit Bynner’s idea of what Chinese poetry is…But here the indolence of the
poet, the “man of sensibility,” should in fact be considered as a literary convention
in the Chinese tradition, disguised as “simple emotion” couched in a commonplace,
even vernacular, idiom.384
Xie argues that what is clearly an example of ironic “literary convention” in the Chinese
tradition is taken at face value by readers like Bynner, when it is more akin in its original
context to the trenchant affectations employed by a writer like T.S. Eliot.385 Yet the
comparison does nothing to dispel a distinctly quotidian, enervated milieu evoked by both
poets. In their zeal to provide historicizing correctives to commonly held beliefs, both
Owen and Xie suggest that any mediating effect of a literary convention or style which
382 Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, 169–70.
383 Ibid., 130.
384 Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism, 212.
385 Ibid.
149
exceeds the author’s own direct, lived experience is fundamentally incompatible with
claims of “realism”–criteria so severe that it surely disqualifies anything found in
Auerbach.386
Let’s turn to a poem that is more suitable for getting to the heart of both Tang
poetics and Bynner’s understanding of it. The following translation, “My Retreat At
Chung-Nan” (“Zhongnan bieye 终南别业,” hereafter “My Retreat at Zhongnan”) appears in
Bynner and Jiang’s suite of Wang Wei poems in Poetry:
My heart in middle age found the Way,
And I came to dwell at the foot of this mountain.
When the spirit moves, I wander alone
Where beauty is known only to me.
I will walk till the water checks my path,
Then sit and watch the rising clouds,
And some day meet an old woodcutter,
And talk and laugh and never return.387
End-rhymes within Chinese poetry have existed since the Shijing 诗经, or Book of Songs, the
earliest official anthology; the major subsequent development of “modern style” jintishi
poetry, which flourished in the Tang, was the introduction of regulated tonal prosody,
where each line is composed not only in accordance with organizational concepts such as
rhetorical parallelism or intensification, but also the sonic principle of pingze 平仄, or “flat”
(ping 平) and “oblique” (ze 仄) tones. The source poem of “My Retreat at Zhongnan”
demonstrates all of these characteristics. To display one’s sophisticated wit and technical
virtuosity in the court of the pre-Tang Southern Dynasties were qualities essential to
386 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, 2003.
387 Wei Wang, “My Retreat At Chung-Nan,” trans. Witter Bynner and Kanghu Jiang, Poetry 19, no. 5
(February 1922): 238. The poem’s later revision in The Jade Mountain remains substantially the same–line 4 is
reworked, and there are minor variations in line enjambment and full and partial end-stops; see Hengtang
Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, 195.
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maintaining one’s social prestige. It was thus essential to master pingze tonal prosody. To do
so demonstrates that you are one who “knows the music,” or in this case “knows the
meter” (zhiyin 知音, literally “knows sound”), thereby demonstrating how you are “at the
forefront of an emerging form of literary skill and knowledge.”388
Xie is by no means incorrect to say that Bynner reads Tang poetry as something
more aesthetically consequential than merely the idle pursuit of the literati or a symptom of
Chinese socioeconomic capital. In his introductory essay to The Jade Mountain, he submits,
“the characteristic method of the best Chinese poetry” is an aesthetics of “substance” over
“turns of expression.”389 In “The Persistence of Poetry,” a privately published edition of
his essay for The Jade Mountain, he elaborates,
Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality. Whereas western
poets will take actualities as points of departure for exaggeration or fantasy or else
as shadows of contrast against dreams of unreality, the great Chinese poets accept
the world exactly as they find it in all its terms, and with profound simplicity find
therein sufficient solace.390
Bynner formulates Chinese poetics as part of a larger, prevailing humanist celebration of
lived experience within Chinese culture, and Bynner and Jiang’s translations bear out this
perspective. An editorial note in Poetry concerning Bynner and Jiang’s translations of Wang
Wei observes, “Mr. Bynner’s preference for the line of four feet and for the four-line or
eight-line poem is his tribute to the close prosodic structure of Chinese poetry. In the
translator’s opinion the form he has chosen is the closest approach to the original which is
388 Goh, “Knowing Sound: Poetry and ‘Refinement’ in Early Medieval China,” 53.
389 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, xvi.
390 Bynner, “The Persistence of Poetry,” 385–86.
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possible in English.”391 However, in the final analysis Bynner assigns little weight to
formal mechanics as ends in themselves, calling them merely “the superficial tricks by
which a Chinese poet” (or English language translator of poetry, for that matter) “makes
his words balanced and melodious.”392 In choosing a flexible free verse line of four feet as
“the closest approach to the original” in English, he instead demonstrates a preference for
what feels “natural and familiar” in English, rather than “exotic or quaint,” so as “to accent
in these T’ang masterpieces the human and universal qualities by which they have
endured.”393 “My Retreat at Zhongnan” is one of many Wang Wei poems set in the
Zhongnan mountains, where he had a family estate often visited when not at the capital.
Thus Wang Wei was “perhaps the greatest of the capital poets,” yet is often remembered
best for his poems which construct a life of the “rural idyll.”394 Towards this point, and in
direct contrast to Xie’s stated assumptions, Bynner cautions the reader not to take “the
indolence of the poet” at face value. He observes, “As a matter of fact Wang Wei was a
physician, a high government official, a great poet, and also one of China’s most illustrious
painters. (A scroll attributed to him is on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York.)”395
391 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 278.
392 Bynner, “The Persistence of Poetry,” 385.
393 Hengtang Tuishi, The Jade Mountain, xix.
394 Fuller, An Introduction to Chinese Poetry, 193.
395 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 274.
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Bynner’s praise of Wang Wei’s “realism” thus ultimately becomes predicated upon
the poet’s rendering of an affective connection to the “heart of life” within the aesthetic
space of the poem–rendering “realism” and “lyrical” as interchangeable. He was not the
only modernist who registered a personal affinity for Wang Wei. Max Eastman, whose PhD
was directed by John Dewey, revised two Wang Wei translations by Moon Kwan,
publishing them in The Liberator.396 He mused, “Isn’t it strange that I should have felt such
an identity with the word’s [sic] of Wang Wei, when I knew so little about them, and they
seem all of them to be just what I want to feel?”397 Nor was Bynner the only poet or
scholar to attempt a translation of “the heart of life” beating within a literary text, or
evaluate a translation as being successful in doing so. Indeed, Wai-lim Yip, Zhaoming Qian,
and Guiyou Huang all make various claims tending towards this direction, though not in
regards to The Jade Mountain but instead Cathay.398 In his “hermeneutical model” of
translation, Venuti assays all such discussion as being rooted in a fallacy of the “true,”
original text. Even when the translator aims for a semantic correspondence to the source
text, the aesthetic function and meaning of the text has always already been interpreted.
Moreover, one can cite different historical interpretations of reading the source text in the
original, which in turn leads to a multiplicity of translations.399 This interpretive
hermeneutic is particularly visible when brought to bear on the textual lineage of Chinese
396 Wei Wang, “Poems of Wang Wei,” trans. Max Eastman and Moon Kwan, The Liberator 3, no. 11
(November 1920).
397 Graham and Irmscher, Love and Loss in Hollywood, 204.
398 Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); Qian, Orientalism and
Modernism; Guiyou Huang, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China and America (London: Associated University
Presses, 1997).
399 Venuti, Theses on Translation An Organon for the Current Moment.
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poetry. As Yunte Huang prudently reminds English readers, the tradition of Chinese poetry
has never been understood to be self-evident, exegetically pellucid, or aesthetically
“pristine” within Chinese scholarship; instead, literary verse typically comes down to
contemporary readers in edited volumes where the poem is visually besieged on all sides of
the printed page, surrounded by a dense historical accretion of paratextual glosses and
critical commentary.400 Both Huang and Venuti reject scholarly tendencies of falling back
upon essentializing claims of what literature or translation is or must be, thereby clearing the
ground for the open, prismatic multiplicity of what it canbe. On this final point, their
respective scholarship is in the final analysis quite amenable to Bynner, Yip, and Qian alike.
In contrast, competing scholars like Xie approach translation from the first principle
of a fundamental untranslatability. By reducing the translated Chinese poem to the many ways
in which it is not and cannot be the original, Xie himself becomes unwittingly ensnared in
an appeal to an “authentic” Chinese text. In this regard they mirror the pronouncement of
Amy Lowell’s reviewer in Chinese Students’ Monthly that “a true representation of Chinese
poetry” cannot be achieved in American free verse. In the face of this supposed
untranslatability of regulated Chinese prosody, however, recent scholarship contests
longstanding assumptions that this verse reflects any essential linguistic or sociocultural
“Chineseness.” Instead, Victor Mair and Tsu-lin Mei attest that tonal regulation in Chinese
prosody is an importation from Sanskrit poetry. Through a comparative reading of Chinese
and Sanskrit sources, the Mair-Mei hypothesis reveals what is taken to be most
quintessentially Chinese is instead a result of inter-imperial sociocultural exchange across
premodern Asia; in other words, itself a product of translation. In The Organization of Distance,
Klein musters this and other translational case studies in an attempt to overturn the
400 Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 76–77.
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essential “Chineseness” which runs through the heart of Chinese poetry.401 In doing so, he
argues Chinese poetry “translated a foreignizing form towards a nativizing aesthetic, and
how it contributes to the creation of a dominant ethic of Chineseness through that
translation.”402 For Klein, the stakes of this is the realization that notions of “Chineseness”
in poetry historically emerged through the transplantation and interplay of the foreign and
native. Rather than a condition of untranslatability, we arrive at a conception of literary
heritage grounded upon conditions of transnational circulation and cross-cultural
appropriation and transformation–translations between English and Chinese being only the
most recent example, rather than some kind of exceptional case. Klein concludes, “If
Chineseness emerges only through translation, then the transference between languages
through which regulated verse became possible must not fade away.”403 Likewise, whither
American modernist and contemporary poetics absent recognition of its emergence and
development in relation to translations of Chinese poetry.
iii. Conclusion: Something to Animate, not to Appropriate
An aspect of Wang Wei’s work neglected by Bynner, Owen, and Xie alike is its
strong association with Buddhism. Indeed, the most plausible interpretation of “Deer-Park
401 Klein addresses the presence of Buddhist Sanskrit in Tang poetry in the chapter Lucas Klein, “Indic Echoes:
Form, Content, and Contested Chineseness in Regulated Verse,” in The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation,
Chineseness (New York: Brill, 2018), 113–53. Moreover, in a footnote in the introduction he credits “the seed”
of his book to his “prolonged meditation on the implications of Mair and Mei’s findings to the question
“What is World Poetry?”; kleinOrganizationDistancePoetry2018, 14
402 Klein, The Organization of Distance, 159.
403 Ibid., 153.
155
Hermitage” is that it functions as Buddhist allegory, with the light shining through the
trees representing a brief moment of insight (jian xing 见性) into how ultimate reality and
the mundane phenomena of everyday life are mutually interpenetrated with one another.
The title of the poem nudges the reader in this direction, as deer are sacred to Buddhism
and symbolically linked to the historical Buddha (for, as tradition has it, it was at Deer Park
that he gave his first sermon). Though Paul Rouzer cautions elsewhere against
overdetermined readings of Buddhist rhetoric in Wang Wei’s poetry, he himself supplies a
very similar gloss to the word “empty” (kong 空) in line 4 of “My Retreat at Zhongnan”:
“The adverbial use of kong (‘empty’) in this line evades reasonable translation. It suggests
that the poet is both conscious of the splendor of the scene but that it is also part of śunyatā,
the essentially ‘unreal’ nature of our reality [within Buddhist metaphysics].”404
Given these textual clues, as well as Bynner’s personal affinity for Wang Wei, it is
startling that he and Jiang claim that Wang Wei was a Daoist–first in their 1922 Poetry
portfolio, and again, unamended, in Jade Mountain. In his discussion of “My Retreat at
Zhongnan,” Bynner contends:
One of [Wang Wei’s poems] begins with the line, “My heart in middle age found
the Way”; the Chinese word for the Way being Tao, the first character of the title of
Lao-tzu’s book, Tao-Te-Ching, which may be translated in whole as The Way and
the Exemplification. Taoism appears, then, to have been the consolation of Wang
Wei, although Professor Herbert M. Giles, in his volume Chinese Literature,
declares it to have been Buddhism.405
The crux of their confusion lays with the word dao 道. Though aligned with Daoism in its
mainstream English usage, it appears as a keyword within a number of Chinese spiritual
404 Wei Wang, The Poetry and Prose of Wang Wei, trans. Paul Rouzer (Boston/Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020), 79.
405 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 273.
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and philosophical traditions, including Confucianism and Buddhism. In the case of
Confucianism, this speaks to the historical presence of dao in Chinese thought before the
codification of specific schools such as Confucianism and Daoism in the Spring and
Autumn and Warring States periods. As for Buddhism, which came to China from India in
later, successive waves, it demonstrates the historical processes of Sinicization and
syncretism–most famously, the intermingling of Chan 禅 Buddhism (widely known in
English by its Japanese transliteration Zen) with Daoism. In this way, a wide corpus of
South Asian texts and practices foreign to Han Chinese culture transformed into one of
China’s three great religions. Wang Wei himself was active in the decades immediately
following Empress Wu Zetian’s patronage of Buddhism at the turn of the 8th century,
when it continued to hold immense sociopolitical prestige in the Tang imperial court.406
Readers inclined to attribute this misreading of Wang Wei wholly to Bynner risk
ignoring his deference to Jiang’s interpretations. Nor would this be the only time where
Jiang’s understanding of Chinese history and culture raises eyebrows, particularly in areas
which extend beyond classical Chinese poetics qua poetics. The error also emphasizes
Bynner’s personal preference towards the philosophical outlook of Wang Wei’s poetry,
describing “the spirit of all his poems” as an attitude of acceptance towards “the natural
way of the universe.”407 In contrast with Pound, who in The Cantos casts both Buddhism
and Daoism as philosophically opposed to his beloved Confucianism, Bynner aligned
himself intellectually with Daoism. As with Pound’s later translations of Confucian texts
406 Rouzer argues that elements in Wang Wei’s poetry traditionally attributed to Chan teachings should more
accurately be read in relation to a plurality of Buddhist schools and texts that Wang Wei would be familiar
with as a lay follower of Huayan 华严 Buddhism–a school which coincided with and later was subsumed by
Chan, but in his own time was historically distinct from it; Wang, The Poetry and Prose of Wang Wei, xxv-xxvi.
407 Bynner, “Translating Wang Wei,” 273.
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which extended beyond the limits of the Fenollosa archive, Bynner also went on to execute
a translation of the Daodejing 道德经 without the support of Jiang.
Titled The Way and Its Exemplification, the book was a commercial success; however,
Bynner expressed reservations about its critical reception–particularly by Waley, who had
lauded The Jade Mountain but was skeptical of this new effort. Bynner was thus deeply grateful
when, four years after mailing it to China, the translation received praise from Jiang.
Written from his prison cell in Nanjing, this would prove to be their final correspondence.
Bynner thanks Jiang for crediting him with a “Fore Nature understanding” of the Daodejing.
He poignantly writes:
Thank you for the sweetness of heart you give me…That is what I thought I had;
and, in spite of Arthur Waley’s strictures against my text, still think I have. To you,
dear friend, I owe it, and I never forget the debt. Well I remember meeting you at
Berkeley and hearing you point some comment with a quotation from a T’ang poet;
and the eleven years together, exchanging texts and making them better each time,
till finally the book evolved which Waley himself called ‘better’ than his own. He
was a very generous man at that time; and I am wondering why, since I told in my
preface [to The Way and Its Exemplification] the fact I lacked your help or that of
someone like you, he did not grant me the inner sense of rightness which I feel
went into the book. You do it, and I love you for it.408
Jiang’s wife had mentioned the existence of an autobiography to Bynner in a previous
letter, and he made an offer to provide “whatever assistance I may to its proper
presentation in English.” One never arrived, and Jiang died in prison in 1954.409
Jiang’s absence from the project was indeed likely to its detriment. The Daodejing is
famously laden with contradiction, paradox, and archaic wordplay, and Bynner speckles his
translation with a euphony that verges on nonsense when his comprehension of the text
408 Bynner, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, 194.
409 Ibid.
158
becomes exhausted. In section two, where a literal translation could plausibly read, “Sound
and voice mutually harmonize; front and back mutually follow” (shengyin xiang he, qianhou
xiang sui 音聲相和、前後相隨; translation mine), Bynner writes, “But, since the varying of
tones gives music to a voice / And what is is the was of what shall be.”410 Nonetheless,
interesting interpretive choices emerge. Bynner renders the dao as “existence,” while shengren
圣人–saint, sage, or wise man–becomes “the sanest man,” stripped of all metaphysical
connotations. Immediately following the previous two lines, his translation reads:
The sanest man
Sets up no deed,
Lays down no law,
Takes everything that happens as it comes,
As something to animate, not to appropriate,
To earn, not to own,
To accept naturally without self-importance:
If you never assume importance
You never lose it.411
Bynner’s approach has been likened to “populist hermeneutics,” one quite similar to his
work on The Jade Mountain: “He demystifies and demotes the sage to emphasize his familiar
and universal qualities.”412 At the same time, couldn’t his description of the “sanest” man
also be read as a “sane,” demystifying approach to translation–one with which even
Weinberger would be likely to approve? One which “lays down no law” but instead “takes
everything that happens” in the text “as it comes”; which approaches translation as
common and natural, and thus “to accept naturally without self-importance”; as an act
410 Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 350.
411 Ibid.
412 Lucas Carmichael, “The Daode Jing as American Scripture: Text, Tradition, and Translation” (PhD
dissertation, University of Chicago, 2017).
159
which should be a credit to the text, rather than renders a “deed” of ownership over it; and
which approaches the text as “something to animate, not to appropriate.”
To reiterate this chapter’s initial point of departure, there was little consensus in
interwar modernism concerning English translations of Chinese poetry; nonetheless,
among Chinese commentators themselves a familiar canonical figure emerged above all
others. In contrast with Bynner’s ethos of populist hermeneutics, one critic of the period,
Xie Wentong 谢文通, argues that distinctions between translations are fundamentally
predicated upon “style.” Diverging from the skepticism of Lowell and Ayscough’s reviewer
in Chinese Students’ Monthly, Xie contends, “Style is as important in translation as in
composition. Messrs. Bynner, Waley and Pound all have it.” (Notably, Lowell and
Ayscough go unmentioned.) Xie follows by differentiating their respective styles:
The drawback lies in the possession of a style: a style individual and inflexible, as in
the case of Mr. Bynner. Mr. Waley submerges his individuality to re-express the
original but compromises with English tradition (especially in the matter of
articulation). Mr. Pound is the only one who, uninhibited by tradition, moulds his
style on the text.413
The claim that Pound “moulds his style on the text” of the Chinese poem instead of
imposing his own may be hard to accept at face value–particularly so when Bynner is
described in contrast as “individual and inflexible” (evaluations previously made by
Tietjens regarding Lowell). Yet this early Chinese critic is not alone on this point. Later
scholars like Yip, Qian, and Huang equally argue Pound demonstrates an intuitive poetic
sensibility in his translation of Chinese poetry, Chinese culture, and Chinese language into
413 Wentong Xie, “English Translations of Chinese Poetry,” Criterion, no. 17 (1938): 423–24.
160
Anglo-American modernism.414 The following chapter will explore how Pound’s
modernist approach to poetry is imbricated by both his organicist-vitalist aesthetics and
“his ingenious etymosinological method” of reading Chinese ideographic characters as
living, intuitively realized modernist images.415
414 Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); Qian, Orientalism and
Modernism; Guiyou Huang, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China and America (London: Associated University
Presses, 1997).
415 Yunte Huang, “Ezra Pound, Made in China,” Paideuma 42 (2015): 43.
161
5. CHAPTER THREE: EZRA POUND’S LIVING CHINESE
CHARACTER
i. The Chinese Room
In 1980, John Searle proposed the thought experiment of a “Chinese Room.”
Imagine a person who does not understand Chinese and sits in a hermetically sealed room.
The person receives questions written in Chinese from somewhere outside–let’s say from
us. The person has instructions and a sequential set of systematic operations which tells
them how to match Chinese characters with other Chinese characters, and thereby send
back an appropriate response. For Marshall Unger, the crucial point is the following:
Instructions we pass to the man under the door may include Chinese characters, but
they only refer to them as visually distinguishable blobs of ink…We are not
permitted to give the man English translations of any kind. So far as he is concerned,
individual Chinese characters are just graphic objects to be compared or copied as
such. He has no idea why they have the shape they do, how they correspond to
Chinese or English words or phrases, or why they are in a certain order…We
simply feed him orders.416
For Searle, restricting our human participant to a series of mechanical inputs and outputs
renders them equivalent to a computer processor parsing machine code. Consequently, the
“Chinese Room” allows us to interrogate the possibility of artificial intelligence in
computers: “if we cannot say that the man in the room behaved intelligently, we have no
416 J. Marshall Unger, Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (Honolulu, HI: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2004), 132.
162
business saying that the computer did either.”417 Unger stumbles a bit on this definitional
point, describing the man in the room as “doing many chores that require intelligence
(reading documents in English, keeping track of vast amounts of paper, visually comparing
on Chinese character with another, deciding whether they are the same or not, copying
them as best he can, sharpening pencils)”–all of which, following Dewey, are easily
identifiable as rote, habituated action, not anything which in and of itself demonstrates a
critical intervention into ongoing affairs which we call “thinking.” Nonetheless, Unger
observes that the conditions of the “Chinese Room” stymie any ability of the participant to
positively influence their experience or what they produce in any way: “the overall plan of
his behavior is as obtuse, plodding, and absurd as anything Kafka or Sartre ever dreamed
up.”418
Searle’s “Chinese Room” stands in direct contrast with both the experimentalism of
Pound’s “Chinese laboratory” and the florid “oriental manner” of early modernist poetry.
Instead, Searle follows figures such as the author Franz Kafka and post-structuralist Roland
Barthes, who muster China and Chinese characters as a theoretical absolute in order to
interrogate broader, universal understandings of human experience and the limits of
human knowledge–to talk, in short, about something other than China.419 Chris Patterson,
for example, argues Barthes’ employment of China as “virtual other” in Travels in China
derives from an awareness that any act of reading Asia is a priori an act of appropriation;
therefore, in his studious attempts to not read or engage with China, “Barthes confronts an
417 Ibid., 133.
418 Ibid.
419 Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” trans. Ian Johnston, Franz Kafka Online, 2023,
https://kafka-online.info/the-great-wall-of-china.html. Franz Kafka Online. 2007-2023.
163
unknown that ‘is neither Japan nor China but his own language, and through it, that of all
the West.’”420 Nonetheless, in order to do so these thinkers invoke Chinese culture and
language as “the stereotype of inscrutability par excellence.” Unger concludes: “How
ironic that, in constructing a powerful argument against a theory of meaning historically
inspired by Chinese characters, Searle resorted to our culture’s crudest preconceptions
about Chinese characters to drive his point home.”421
ii. Rays Ideogram
All of the voluminous, multifarious research concerning Ezra Pound’s engagement
with Chinese characters can perhaps be summarized into one single statement: Chinese
characters were much more for him than merely “visually distinguishable blobs of ink.”
Indeed, they may even carry within them the core of his aesthetic philosophy itself. In the
1986 Fall and Winter issue of Paideuma, the writer and translator Eliot Weinberger
published “A Note on the Cathay Ideogram.” He remarks:
The Chinese character that appears on the cover of the first edition of Cathay and on
p. 254 of The Cantos as a sort of frontispiece to Cantos LII-LXXI has, I understand,
received no comment by Pound scholars. Pound called it the RAYS ideogram, and
analyzed it in the Fenollosa notes as “bright + feathers flying.”
耀422
420 Christopher Patterson, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York: New York
University Press, 2020), 254. For a concise summary of critique and defense of Barthes’s employment of
Japan and China, see Patterson, ibid., 250-254.
421 Unger, Ideogram, 136.
422 Eliot Weinberger, “A Note on the Cathay Ideogram,” Paideuma. Mitteilungen Zur Kulturkunde 15 (1986): 141.
164
Weinberger observes that this character had remained unremarked upon until his brief
explication in the pages of Paideuma; indeed, in the years since scholarly work on the
character has rarely gone further than his initial observations. Suggestive of its intractable
resistance to strategies of interpretation, scholarship tends to replicate Weinberger’s
intimations that the character “not only means but also includes elements of brightness,
splendor, and honor—all of course essential EP words.”423 Mary Paterson Cheadle describes
this character as an “exclamation of light,” indicative of Pound searching for a word “that
would announce the ‘enlightened’ examples he believed Chinese history provided.”424
Josephine Park employs Cheadle’s reading to argue that the character has a “splendor”
which “makes overwhelmingly clear the full impossibility of pinning down this image in
English.”425 James McDougal likewise reads this character in relation to ideas of
illumination and concealment. Elaborating upon Cheadle’s position that Pound’s
philosophy is one of Neoconfucianist enlightenment, McDougal suggests that Cathay offers
“a poetics of ‘Illumination’ in both the sense of text as image”—akin to the western
medieval illuminated text—“as well as text as radiating direct thought.”426 What none of
these accounts do, however, is definitely link these suggestions of light, illumination, or
luminousness to a larger aesthetic project. An annotation of this character in a critical
edition of Cathay best summarizes the ambivalent state of affairs, observing that “almost any
423 Ibid., emphasis his.
424 Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 224.
425 Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 40.
426 James McDougal, “Exclusions and Innovations: The Incorporation of Chinese Literature in Modern
American Poetry,” (University of Florida, 2007), 102.
165
composite character can be read ideogrammically, if you choose to do so,” and that “folk
etymology is poesis.”427
What lays unexplored in these glosses is how this rhetoric of light is central to
Pound’s discussion of the Vortex of the eponymous vorticist aesthetic movement, which he
defines in “Vorticism” as a “radiant node or cluster.”428 It is my contention that this
confluence of the Rays ideogram and the central term of Pound’s vorticist project is
demonstrative of how the discourses of vorticism, the Chinese character, and the influence
of T.E. Hulme and other vitalist-organicist philosophies are not unrelated or parallel
avenues of inquiry for Pound, but are indeed projects of the closest connections which
necessitate the reading of all three in relation to and within each other. Such an approach to
Pound can be understood as a critical counterpart to what Hulme describes in Speculations as
an “intensive manifold,” “a complex thing which yet cannot be said to have parts because
the parts run into each other, forming a continuous whole, and whose parts cannot even
be conceived as existing separately.”429
Beginning with imagism and arriving at vorticism, this chapter traces the
development of Pound’s aesthetic theory of the poetic image. Through a historical analysis
427 See Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, Edited by Timothy Billings (Fordham University Press, 2019), 75.
Indeed, panel participants in “Modernism in Literature and the Arts: East and West” at the 2019 ACLA
conference supplemented the above readings of the character with their own intuitive etymologies. They
observed how this character is phonetically similar to “want” (yao 要) and compositionally similar to “leap”
(yue 躍). The irresistibility of this impulse demonstrates Roman Jakobson’s suggestion that “phonemic
similarity is sensed as semantic relationship” within the space of poetry, and “the pun, or to use a more
erudite, and perhaps more precise term — paronomasia, reigns over poetic art.” (Roman Jakobson, “On
Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (Harvard University Press, 1995),
238)
428 Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review 96 (1914): 461–71, http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.
429 T. E. Speculations Hulme, Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, Edited by Herbert Read (Brace and Company,
Harcourt, 1936), 181.
166
of the parallel development of Pound’s theory of the Chinese character—the putative
“ideogram”—and his aesthetic, vitalist-organicist theory of vorticism, I argue that any
account of Pound’s vorticist project must reckon with his biological understanding of
Chinese characters, and that the Chinese character in turn is positioned by Pound as the
preeminent nonrepresentational vorticist Image by way of Fenollosa’s “ideogrammic
method.” Reading these discourses in Pound’s work in tandem with and against one
another allows for new approaches to understanding its inherently transnational nature. As
exemplified by the Rays ideogram frontispiece, any account of Pound’s work—and indeed,
of Anglo-American modernism as a whole—is left incomplete without attention to its
transpacific character.
Cheadle advocates an attention to the precise, definitional meaning of Chinese
characters for Pound–particularly as they are found in TheCantos–and cautions against what
she sees as over-attention to the visual, “spectacular” nature of the characters themselves.430
Nevertheless, the connections between Pound’s understanding of these characters and his
vorticist project have yet to be sufficiently plumbed. Michael Levenson, R. John Williams,
and Zhaoming Qian have all made substantial scholarly contributions to the respective roles
that vitalism, vorticism, and Chinese characters play in Pound’s work, but none of their
accounts can be said to be holistically complete. Levenson provides a definitive account of
vorticism’s philosophical origins in the work of late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century thinkers, but lacks an understanding of the role that Chinese language
and poetry plays in the genealogy of modernism.431 Qian serves as a corrective to Levenson
430 Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations, 223.
431 Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
167
by centralizing the substantial influence of Chinese art and poetics for Pound and other
modernist writers, but in turn minimizes any correlations between Pound’s work on
Chinese characters and poetry and his commitment to vorticism.432 Most recently,
Williams richly traces out Pound’s respective affinities for vorticism and Ernest Fenollosa’s
work on the Chinese character, perceiving a technological imperative which binds the two
endeavors together; at the same time, he omits any consideration towards the crucial
philosophical undercurrent of vitalism and organicism within these projects.433 An account
is necessary which reflects the primacy of all three of these projects—vitalism, Vorticism,
and Chinese characters—in the development of Pound’s understanding of the Image.
Pound’s initial conception of a modernist poetry which prioritizes the image is
indebted to Hulme. In April 1909, Pound joined Hulme’s salon, which met every
Wednesday on Frith Street at the Cafe Tour d’Eiffel in London. Hulme and other members
of the club, such as F.S. Flint, expressed interest in French Symbolist poetry and wrote
haiku as a kind of pastime pleasure, rather than as a serious literary pursuit. Flint noted that
in all of these activities, Hulme functioned as the “ringleader.”434 Where Hulme and his
group gained their knowledge of haiku from, however, is less than clear. Reading “History
of Imagism,” Flint’s account of the group’s early imagist activity published in May 1915 in
432 Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995).
433 R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press,
2014).
434 Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. (University of Massachusetts
Press, 1996), 55.
168
The Egoist, Earl Miner speculates that the group’s exposure to Japanese poetry came from
French sources, given Flint’s use of the word “haikai” to refer to haiku — an earlier
appellation for the form which Miner contends “was used almost exclusively by the
French.”435 Along with Flint’s references to “a poetry in vers libre, akin in spirit to the
Japanese,” this serves as proof for Miner that French Symbolism and Japanese haiku were
indelibly linked in the minds of Hulme’s imagist group.436 He contends, “The group had
probably discovered Japanese poetry from the French and in French translations which
tended to blur the lines of difference between what was essentially Japanese and what was
typical of French taste at the time.”437 Additionally, Qian persuasively argues that Pound
took inspiration early on from another source: his exposure to Chinese and Japanese
paintings curated by Laurence Binyon at the British Museum.438
Despite the group’s eventual dissolution as Hulme’s interests shifted from poetry
and towards philosophy, Hulme’s work during this period had an indelible effect upon
Pound and his development of imagism. A sample of Hulme’s poems, sardonically titled
“The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme,” appears in the January 25th, 1912 number
of The New Age, and again in an appendix to Pound’s 1912 collection Ripostes. His brief,
scenic poems of image-based epiphanies stand out in marked contrast to Pound’s more
rhetorically focused work in this early collection. In “The Painter,” for example, Pound
435 Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (1958: Princeton University Press, n.d.), 101.
436 Ibid., 104.
437 Ibid., 101–2.
438 “Pound and Chinese Art in the ‘British Museum Era’,” in The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, by Zhaoming
Qian (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1–21.
169
responds to a painting attributed, at the time, to Renaissance painter Jacopo de Sellaio–not
by ekphrastically shaping the visual features of the work into descriptive imagery, but
rather by conveying the effect the work has upon the speaker, who plainly and directly
repeats the sentence, “The eyes of the dead lady speak to me.”439 In marked contrast to this
rhetorical move, Hulme’s “Autumn” observes in imaginative and sensorial detail “the
ruddy moon lean over a hedge / Like a red-faced farmer,” and “wistful stars / With white
faces like town children.”440 Miner appraises this poem as having the tone and intellectual
control of symbolism, and if not the form or content of haiku, “shows an awareness of
Japanese poetry which is new to English writers.”441
The publication of Hulme’s poems is often understood as the commencement of
imagism proper.442 To further emphasize this point, the “three rules” of imagism which
Pound famously refers to in “A Few Don’ts,” published in March 1913 in Poetry and
preceded by a short preface attributed to Flint titled “Imagisme,” are observed to have been
“repeatedly enunciated by their old friend Hulme.”443 Despite this, Pound does not see fit
to attribute the source of these imagist rules to him. Flint would later attempt to correct the
record in “History of Imagism,” crediting Pound with launching imagism as a movement
in 1912 and Hulme with the theory of imagism and the first imagist poems in 1909.
439 Ezra Pound, “Ripostes [1912], Elkin Matthew” 1915 (n.d.): 51.
440 Ibid., 60.
441 Ibid., 103.
442 Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism., 57.
443 Ibid., 58.
170
Pound, for his part, went on to write Hulme out of the record of the history of imagism
entirely, along with Flint as his proxy. In his republication of “A Few Don’ts” in Pavannes and
Divagations, his 1918 collection of essays, Pound omits Flint’s preface, instead publishing a
new preface titled “A Retrospect,” which argues that the three “principles” of imagism
were “agreed upon” by Richard Aldington, H.D., and himself “in the early spring or
summer of 1912.”444
The divestment by Pound from Amy Lowell further demonstrates Pound’s desire to
assert precise definition and authorial control over imagism. In fact, Pound’s involvement
with vorticism, a pointedly androcentric movement, can be seen as the consequence of his
disavowal of Lowell and what he saw as her usurpation of imagism. In November 1913,
Pound was still championing Lowell and her imagist compatriot John Fletcher in his
correspondences, politely addressing Lowell as “Miss Lowell” and calling Harriet Monroe a
“bloody fool” in regards to a recent, minor editorial decision concerning one of Lowell’s
poems.445 In the summer of 1914 he went as far as offering to attend dinner with Lowell
and discuss their current enterprises, including BLAST, the short-lived magazine which
would become synonymous with the veritable boys club of vorticism.446 By that August,
however, Pound was voicing his first protestations to Lowell’s proposal for an annual
imagist anthology. Pound states, “I should like the name ‘Imagism’ to retain some sort of a
444 See Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divagations (New York: Knopf, 1918). Daniel Tiffany argues that the original
preface, “Imagisme,” was in fact ghostwritten by Pound and merely attributed to Flint. If so, this would
provide even more reason for Pound to disavow it after his falling out with Flint. Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse:
Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard University Press, 1995), 45-46.
445 Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. Paige (Brace and Company, Harcourt, 1950), 64.
446 Ibid., 77.
171
meaning.”447 He goes on in a subsequent August letter to write, “I think your annual
anthology should be called Vers Libre or something of that sort. Obviously it will consist in
great part of the work of people who have not taken the trouble to find out what I mean by
‘Imagism.’ I should, as I have said, like to keep the term associated with a certain clarity
and intensity.”448
From this point on, Pound’s relationship to Lowell would rapidly deteriorate; in the
end he would only express excorious contempt and ridicule towards her. In September
1914, Pound’s essay “Vorticism” appeared in the Fortnightly Review. Originally titled
“Imagism,” this essay provides a developmental account of how vorticism emerges from
Pound’s earlier understanding of imagism, while also signaling a break with his earlier
identification of himself as an imagist.449 Compounding this, in October he stumbles upon
an advertisement in Poetry for Amy Lowell’s Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, which declares Lowell
the “foremost member of the ‘Imagists.’”450 In response, Pound sputters to Harriet
Monroe, “It is, of course, comic. On the other hand, it is outrageous.”451 To Lowell herself,
Pound declares the ad “arrant charlatanism,” asserting, “I was quite right in refusing to
join you in any scheme for turning Les Imagistes into a critical democracy.” He goes on to
suggest that Lowell’s advertisement was tantamount to libel, concluding with the
447 Ibid., 79.
448 Ibid., 78–79.
449 Pound, “Vorticism.”
450 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 84.
451 Ibid.
172
proposition, or vague threat, “I think you had better cease referring to yourself as an
Imagiste.”452
One could make a convincing case that Pound’s personal investment in vorticism
seems to conveniently arrive at the same time he is compelled to chauvinistically distance
himself from Lowell; moreover, the pretense of a new philosophical (because masculinist)
rigor and discernment which vorticism places upon the image provides Pound with a good
cover in doing so. Compounding this, Pound’s publication of “Vorticism” signals a
distancing of his aesthetic judgment not only from Lowell but also Monroe and other
American writers, in favor of a more exclusive coterie of writers and artists based in
England. This position, held by Timothy Materer, argues that vorticism is Pound’s effort to
rebrand his work into “an improved version of Imagism,” and thereby distinguish himself
above Lowell and her mainstream democratization of imagism.453 To be sure, this does
seem to be partly the case. At the same time, a clear difference between imagism and
vorticism emerges in Pound’s thought at this moment which in the final analysis extends
well beyond the totalizing motives of either sweeping misogyny or crass careerism.
Yoshinobu Hakutani offers the following account of Pound’s seminal articulation of
the poetic image in “Vorticism”:
As Pound explained in his essay, the image is not a static rational idea … An image,
he argued, does not constitute simply a picture of something. As a vortex, the
image must be “endowed with energy.” … To demonstrate his poetic theory,
Pound thought of an image not as a decorative emblem or symbol but as a seed
452 Ibid., 84–85.
453 Timothy Materer, Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism, 1996,
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/Imagism.htm.
173
capable of germinating and developing into another organism. As an illustration he
presented what he called “a hokku-like sentence.”454
The particularities of this conception of Pound’s image are noteworthy. There is a palpable
vitalist-organicist understanding of the image as being akin to a seed. Like a seed, the
image is “endowed with energy,” allowing for the potential for it to germinate and flower
into something entirely new. As the image is not static but instead conceived as a dynamic
vortex, it likewise has a nascent, biological potential to be a meaningful influence upon the
history of world literature. This point is critical to Pound’s aesthetic understanding of
literature as constantly being renewed by a return to those texts of the past which are
engendered with an autonomous, evergreen vitality or radiance. This conception of the
energized image also provides a criterion by which he can differentiate his poetics from
writers such as Lowell.
Alongside this investment in vitalist-organicist metaphors, Hakutani notes the
influence of East Asian poetics upon Pound’s conception of the vorticist image. Notably,
however, Haukutani makes only a passing reference to Pound’s own explanation of “In a
Station of the Metro” as a “hokku-like sentence,” with no reference to Pound’s work in
Chinese. Elsewhere in the article, Hakutani incorrectly observes that Pound only became
interested in Chinese poetics in 1918 with his editorial work on Fenollosa’s The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.455 Moreover, he judges that the sources for Pound’s
scientistic, vitalist ideas which he expresses in “Vorticism” are “hard to determine.”456
454 Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Modern Philology 90, no. 1 (1992):
47–48.
455 Ibid., 50.
456 Ibid., 48.
174
Given Hakutani’s focus on the work of the transnational poet Yone Noguchi, it is
understandable how he would emphasize the Japanese influence on Pound over the
Chinese. Nonetheless, this bias incorrectly conflates vorticism with imagism, flattening
Pound’s chronological development from the latter to the former, as well as his divestment
from imagism generally in favor of vorticism.
It is interesting to weigh Hakutani’s account of Pound’s vorticist Image against one
more recent by Daniel Tiffany:
Not long after the first public explanations of Imagism, Pound backed away from
the belletristic emblem of the Image as a Chinese ideogram, acknowledging
implicitly the ambiguity and “softness” of the original stance (embodied in the
“Metro” poem). A more forceful approach was required. Within a year of the
Imagist manifesto, he converted Imagism into Vorticism and seized on the more
dynamic emblem of the “vortex” as a means of heralding his campaign against the
“mushiness” and “putrefaction” of corpse language. Yet the poetry and translations
that Pound published during the period of his association with Vorticism
(especially the seminal translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry in Cathay and
Lustra) continued to display the resonant and elegiac diction of his early poetry.
Alluding to a series of failed interventions, Pound described Lustra (1916), his first
book of poems after launching the Imagist movement, as “absolutely the last
obsequies of the Victorian period” (L 23). It was not, however, to be his last
attempt to put the past behind him.”457
A perceptive and innovative reader of Pound and modernist poetics generally, Tiffany
nonetheless makes several contestable claims about Pound’s own understanding of his
work in Cathay and Lustra in relation to vorticism. Here, Tiffany’s periodization falls on the
other extreme of that articulated by Hakutani. Whereas Hakutani omits any reference to
Chinese poetry in his account of vorticism, Tiffany suggests that Pound had already been
457 Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (John Hopkins University Press, 2015), 140.
175
exposed to Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese character by the time of writing “In a Station
of the Metro,” published in Poetry in April 1913.458
As we have already seen, accounts of imagism differ from one another, even among
those who were there at the beginning; this likewise extends to its point of cultural
departure. In 1945, John Gould Fletcher contends in The Asian Legacy and American Life that
imagism should be read in relation to China–what should be a timely and politically
expedient argument, given that the United States was at war with Japan and strongly allied
with China.459 Yet in his review of the book, Witter Bynner disagrees with Fletcher’s
account, arguing he “offers more theory than evidence,” and that the imagists were a
“Japanese rather than Chinese manner.” To look to the latter’s influence on early modernist
poetry, he suggests that “Mr. Fletcher might more pertinently have considered such poems
as Vachel Lindsay’s ‘The Chinese Nightingale’ and ‘The Empire of China is Crumbling
Down.’”460
All that said, we should remember that the point of disambiguation we are
concerned with here is not what imagism was, necessarily, but rather what it was for Pound.
Given this, some clarification of the chronology is now required. It is in October 1913 that
Pound refers to the twenty-four poem cycle of his Lustra poems as “the last obsequies of the
458 Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” Poetry. 1 (1913): 7.
459 John Gould Fletcher, “The Orient and Contemporary Poetry,” in The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur
Christy (New York: John Day Company, 1945), 145–74.
460 Witter Bynner, “Patterns of Eastern Culture,” in Prose Pieces, ed. James Kraft, TheWorks ofWitter Bynner (1945;
repr., New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1979), 238.
176
Victorian period.”461 As such, his work on these poems–though not their
publication–entirely predates his exposure to Chinese poetics in the manuscripts of Ernest
Fenollosa, which Pound writes about in a letter to William Carlos Williams in December
1913.462 Where Tiffany seems to be astray is that he conflates Pound’s judgment on Lustra,
as a poetic cycle, with Lustra as a final published book–the latter belatedly appearing three
years later in 1916, with several additional sections. By that time, however, Pound had
already moved on towards new directions.
Pound himself acknowledges how his publication history creates a confusion
concerning the periodization of his progression from Japanese-based poetics in imagism to
Chinese-based poetics in vorticism. In a 1917 letter to Kate Buss, Pound responds in the
negative to her assumption that a poem published in his collection Lustra “was in any way
influenced by Chinese stuff which I did not see until a year or two later.” He elaborates,
“The error is natural as Cathay appeared before Lustra, but the separate poems in Lustra had
mostly been written before the Chinese translations were begun and had mostly been
printed in periodicals either here [England] or in America.”463 As a miscellaneous
collection which both precedes and is contemporaneous to Cathay, Lustra collapses three
different periods in Pound’s poetic development: his earlier imagist experiments
influenced by Japanese poetics, of which “In a Station of the Metro” is the most famous
example; a transitional period where Pound became interested in Chinese art and poetry,
but still largely conceptualized their thematic content through a formalist lens of Japanese
461 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 23.
462 Ibid., 27–28.
463 Ibid., 101.
177
poetics; and finally, Pound’s Chinese translations and other poems following his exposure
to Fenollosa’s manuscripts, much of which previously appeared in Cathay in 1915 or were
of a piece to it.
It is instructive to consider how Pound’s thinking concerning the Chinese character
arises in parallel to the development of vorticism. Like Pound’s thoughts concerning the
poetic image, Pound’s thinking and exposure towards East Asian poetics is marked at this
period by a rapid series of paradigmatic shifts. In March 1913, Pound published his
seminal statement on imagism, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” in Poetry magazine, quickly
followed in the April issue by “In a Station of the Metro.” The following November 1913,
Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe that his anthology of Imagist poetry, Des Imagistes,464 would
be published by The Glebe.465 It was soon published in 1914, with six poems contributed by
Pound.466 Four of the six poems were adapted from Herbert Giles’ 1901 History of Chinese
Literature, without Pound having any access to or way of understanding the original Chinese
source poems.467 Instead, Pound revised Giles’ translations through his Imagist
understanding of the concision and image-centered poetics of Japanese haiku.468 The date
464 Concerning Pound’s peculiar insistence on referring to imagism as Imagisme, and imagists as Imagistes,
William Pratt observes that even though imagism is fundamentally an Anglo-American redefinition of poetry,
“Pound chose to pay homage to the French school of the Symbolistes by giving the name a French spelling and
by calling his first anthology in 1914 Des Imagistes, his translation into French of what would have been Some
Imagists” (William Pratt, Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism (AMS Press, 2007), 121).
465 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 24–25.
466 Ezra Pound, “Des Imagistes,” The Glebe. 1 (1914): 5.
467 Herbert Giles, trans., A History of Chinese Literature (1901; repr., New York: D. Appleton and Company,
2013), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43711/43711-h/43711-h.htm.
468 Interestingly, despite the influence of Japanese poetics on his early aesthetic development, Pound never
took an interest in the Japanese language in and of itself the way he later does Chinese; instead, his
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of Pound’s correspondence with Monroe makes it clear that these early poems–“After Ch’u
Yuan,” “Liu Ch’e,” “Fan-Piece For Her Imperial Lord,” and “Ts’ai Chi’h”–were all written
and slated for publication no later than November 1913. During this same period, Pound
was also publishing his own original Imagist poems such as “Gentildonna,” which appears
in the November 1913 issue of Poetry, and concludes with the striking image, “Gray olive
leaves beneath a rain-cold sky.” All of these poems would be later included in Lustra.469
On November 24, 1913, Mary Fenollosa writes to Pound that she is sending him
Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts concerning his notes and translations on Japanese and
Chinese culture and poetics. Pound wastes no time getting to work. In the aforementioned
December 1913 letter to William Carlos Williams, Pound informs him of the publication
of his imagist anthology, mentioning as an aside, “I am very placid and happy and busy.
Dorothy is learning Chinese. I’ve all old Fenollosa’s treasures in mss [manuscripts].”470
Later in the letter, he cryptically tells Williams, currently in the United States, “You may
get something slogging away by yourself that you would miss in The Vortex—and that we
miss,”471 employing the term “Vortex” for the first time in their correspondence. Finally,
Pound mentions Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a sculptor who would become central in
vorticism’s brief flourishing as a group, as well as a nearly mythic figure for Pound: after
engagement with Japanese largely operated through the way in which it serves as a conduit for Chinese
language and poetry. As a point of fact, the first non-European script which drew his attention was neither
Japanese nor Chinese but Bengali, the language of Rabindranath Tagore, of whom Pound was an early
supporter. Pound found the phonetics of Bengali writing overly imposing, and with the acquisition of the
Fenollosa manuscripts he pivoted to Chinese for good. For Pound’s discussion of Bengali and Tagore, see Ezra
Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929, ed. David Moody, Joanna Moody, and Mary de Rachewiltz
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 285-292.
469 Ezra Pound, Lustra (London: Elkin Mathews, 1916).
470 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 27.
471 Ibid., 28.
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Gaudier-Brzeska died in the trenches during World War I in 1915, Pound quickly wrote a
memoir about their intellectual friendship and brought it to publication in the following
year.472 Pound’s first epistolary remarks concerning Fenollosa’s manuscripts, Chinese
characters, and vorticism all coincide and attest to their mutual development. The first
imagist anthology had yet to be printed, and yet Pound was already off in entirely new
poetic directions–a situation made more clear by the publication of “Vorticism” in
September 1914.
Although Tiffany gets tangled up in the dates of Pound’s 1914 poetic activity, he is
on the mark in emphasizing the primacy of the “dynamic emblem of the ‘vortex’” within
Pound’s thinking, as well as how Pound employs his vorticist thinking to differentiate it
from the “mushiness” of imagism as employed by others. The development of Pound’s
thought from imagism to vorticism accordingly can be seen by reading “Vorticism” in
tandem with his earlier statements on imagism in “A Few Don’ts.” Crucially, Pound
contends, “Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity,” and “The point of
Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech.”473
Here, Pound sets his sights squarely on Lowell’s imagist poems, which Pound appraised as
nothing but ornamental “Amygism” corrupting the proper aims of imagism. The
masculinist invocation of imagism’s “flaccidity,” or loss of potent vitality in
contradistinction to vorticism, continues this line of thought. Crucially, Pound links the
imagism of “In a Station of the Metro” to the poetics of Japanese haiku. He refers to haiku
as a “one-image poem,” and observes that his own attempt at such an approach aesthetic
472 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970).
473 Pound, “Vorticism.”
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approach resulted in a “hokku-like sentence”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
/ Petals, on a wet, black bough.”474
Pound’s use of “In a Station of the Metro” in “Vorticism” demonstrates how his
conception of imagism becomes assimilated into his “own branch of vorticism.” This is
exemplified in his pronouncement, “In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the
precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing
inward and subjective.” In “Metro,” the outward objective phenomena of the masses
waiting for their subway car to arrive is collectivized into a plastic, indivisible “apparition”
of bodies caught up in the circuit of Paris’ mass transportation system–even as these bodies
resist collectivity through the sensorial detail of their individual “faces.” The image which
hinges on Pound’s paratactic, diaphoric enjambment suggests the huddled urban
commuting masses have not been converted into inhumane, mechanistic cogs of
technological modernity; instead, they are as natural, beautiful, and classically poetic as
“petals, on a wet, black bough.” It is this technique of parataxis which Pound refers to as
the “super-position” of the poem, allowing for one idea to be “set on top of another” so as
to become a single combinatory image or vortex. In this way, Pound’s technique of
super-positional diaphoric metaphor, learned from Japanese haiku, elides the clear
474 See Pound, ibid. Though Pound’s account in “Vorticism” is more canonical, in 1913 he offers a
somewhat different narrative of the origins of “In a Station of the Metro.” Rather than the condensation of a
longer, attenuated poem into a hardened, imagist core, Pound describes the poem as a translation into English
of a Japanese haiku (more accurately senryū 川柳) sensibility. He writes, “It struck me that in Japan, where a
work of art is not estimated by its acreage and where sixteen [sic] syllables are counted enough for a poem if
you arrange and punctuate them properly, one might make a very little poem which would be translated as
follows.” Ezra Pound, “How I Began,” T.P.’s Weekly, June 6, 1913, 707. Thank you to Xiulu Wang, whose
presentation on the “Poematic Accident” at the ACLA 2022 conference introduced me to Pound’s alternate
account.
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hierarchical relationship in western letters of subject and metaphor, vehicle and tenor,
becoming an “inward and subjective” vorticist image.475
On the one hand, Pound’s conception of the poem in “Vorticism” as recording a
“precise instant” recalls his earlier conception of the imagist poem as a “intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time.”476 On the other, Pound’s emphasis on precision
belies how this instance discloses an intensified temporal structure in which it and all
phenomena are constantly unfolding, akin to the dynamic vortex “from which, and
through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” Although Pound previously
conceives of imagism as “direct treatment of the thing” and as a “complex” which binds
intellectual and emotional understanding together in the same event or moment, his
understanding of vorticism here takes on a new dimension. He declares, “THE IMAGE IS
NOT an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a
VORTEX.”477
This language of inward directionality and dynamic, intensive energy is the
hallmark of Pound’s conception of the vorticist image. Pound elaborates on this point with
the following helpful taxonomy: “Now you have vorticism, which is, roughly speaking,
expressionism, neo-cubism, and Imagism gathered together in one camp and futurism in
the other. Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art
475 Pound later republishes “In a Station of the Metro” in his 1915 anthology A Catholic Anthology, attesting to a
continuing belief in the poem as a faithful demonstration of his aesthetic theory of the image. Ezra Pound, ed.,
Catholic Anthology 1914-1915 (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915).
476 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect and ‘A Few Don’ts.’” in Pavannes and Divagations (New York: Knopf, 1918),
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts.
477 Pound, “Vorticism.”
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movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed
to vorticism, which is intensive.” Pound’s position that vorticism is entirely distinct from
Futurism — which he refers to elsewhere in the manifesto as “verbal diarrhoea” — seems
at first blush needlessly antagonistic, given that the strident, masculinist rhetoric of each
camp are very much of the same ilk. Indeed, Pound would take up a new interest in
Futurism in the 1930s after pledging his allegiance to Mussolini, putting aside many of his
former criticisms. That said, Pound makes here two clear distinctions between these
respective movements: Futurism spreads and exteriorizes, while vorticism collapses into
the radiant interiority of a Vortex, and Futurism accelerates into the future while vorticism
seeks to glean from an evergreen, vibrant past.
Pound’s aesthetic positioning of vorticism is later recalled by him in “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberly,” written between 1919 and 1920.478 As Tiffany notes, the poem “offers a
summation of Pound’s long struggle with divergent conceptions of the Image.”479 In
unmetered, rhyming quatrains, Pound observes that his attempts to return to the vitality of
the past, “to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry” have left him “out of key with his time”;
despite this, Pound’s projects of imagism and vorticism are revealed to be attempts at a
poetics which are both proper for the modern age and “maintain ‘the sublime’ / in the old
sense” of previous ages. However, Pound sardonically notes that what the “age demanded”
was not new configurations of an aesthetic sublime, but rather “an image / of its
accelerated grimace”. Rather than the “Attic grace” or “alabaster” of Pound’s unorthodox
classicalism, the age seeks the “accelerated grimace” of Futurism, or a “prose cinema” of
478 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [Part I],” Poetry Foundation, 2023, www.poetry
foundation.org/poems/44915/hugh-selwyn-mauberly-part-i.
479 Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound, 51.
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intimations and impressions without cohesion or aesthetic conviction.480 This latter
critique of what Pound sees as the “flaccid” post-impressionism of cinema is made clear by
his swipe at Monet in “Vorticism”: “The organization of forms is a much more energetic
and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack.”481
Given these later reflections, what appears most manifestly important for Pound in
“Vorticism” is his statement that “Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is
concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression.
One desires the most intense, for certain forms of expression are ‘more intense’ than others.
They are more dynamic.” One model for Pound’s rhetoric of intensive vitalism in
“Vorticism” is Walter Pater. Pound turns to Pater as a non-Romantic, expressionist
understanding of art’s autonomous affect, noting that in TheRenaissance, “Pater proclaimed
that ‘All arts approach the conditions of music.’” In fact, much of Pound’s vitalist rhetoric
is inherited from Pater. Pound’s concept of the “hard light” and “clear edges” of imagism,
for example, has strong echoes of Pater’s comparison of the ecstasy of life to a “hard,
gemlike flame.” (One may well note the phallocentric language inherent to both Pater’s
“hard, gemlike flame” and Pound’s critique of artistic “flaccidity.”) Moreover, Pater
immediately precedes this phrase with the following rhetorical question: “How shall we
pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest
number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?” In one sense, Pound’s understanding
of vorticism is an attempt to formulate an aesthetic answer to Pater’s question.
480 Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [Part I].”
481 Pound, “Vorticism.”
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As discussed in the introductory chapter, Pound also located his empiricist literary
approach in the laboratory conditions of nineteenth-century biologist Louis Agassiz.
Moving beyond Pater and Agassiz, however, it becomes challenging to find
contemporaneous thinkers whom Pound acknowledges as influences (rather than
counterparts) for his decidedly twentieth-century organicist-vitalist aesthetic theory;
indeed, such a search may even be a dead-end. What makes this both interesting and
unsatisfactory is the way it vividly contrasts with his explicit acknowledgment of his recent
literary antecedents. The primary example of the latter is the way in which he aligns himself
with Fenollosa, establishing an ersatz transmission of lineage. Pound’s idiosyncratic
approach to the transliteration of Chinese names, though not always read as such in
scholarship, is a stark example of this alignment. Before his acquisition of the Fenollosa
manuscripts he demonstrates an awareness of Chinese poets such as Li Bai 李白 and Tao
Yuanming 陶渊明–having first encountered them in Herbert Giles’ History of Chinese
Literature.482 Yet his translations from Fenollosa’s manuscripts in Cathay and Lustra opt instead
for the obscure appellations “Rihaku” and “To-em-mei,” following the Japanese onyomi 音
読み reading of the Chinese characters.483 Moreover, he continues to argue for the validity
482 According to Huang, it was Upward who introduced Giles to Pound. (Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement:
Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. (Oakland, CA: University of
California Press, 2002), 67) Pound anthologized Upward’s Scented Leaves in Des Imagistes, and certain elements of
Upward’s method (“Sayings of K’ung,” for example, published in The Egoist) are quite similar to aspects of
Pound’s translational method in The Cantos, where he appropriates the historical information found in
Giles History of Chinese Literature into free verse poetry with not only history in it, but also an explicit economic
agenda. Pound writes to Achilles Fang in 1951 that he has “Not read ANY guide or history of Chinese
literature since closed Giles history Ch/ Lit/ about 1909. Had Fenollosa’s notes and selections and thaZZZall.”
(Zhaoming Qian, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 53)
483 Lustra’s function as an anthology of Pound’s poetry throughout the 1910s attests to this contradiction.
While he attributes his translations from Fenollosa’s manuscript to Japanese transliterated names, earlier
poems in the collection reference figures such as “Ch’u Yuan” (Qu Yuan 屈原) and “Liu Ch’e” (Liu Che 刘彻
/ Han Wudi 汉武帝, or Emperor Wu of the Western Han) following Wade-Giles romanizations. This tension
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of this practice well after successive modernist translations of Chinese poetry, such as The
Jade Mountain, would seem to render his position untenable. In a letter to Katue Kitasono in
1940, he demonstrates familiarity with pronunciations of the Confucian Book of Great Learning
(大学) in Japanese–Dai gaku–as well as in Mandarin, which Pound renders as Ta tsü. Yet
neither of these pronunciations reflect the Southern Yue dialect family (Yueyu 粤语)
reflected in Pauthier’s title of his French translation, Ta Hio–dutifully retranslated by Pound
into Ta Hio: The Great Learning.484 All the same, Pound contends, “As sheer sound Dai Gaku is
better than Ta Tsü. When it comes to the question of transmitting from the East to the West,
a great part of the Chinese sound is no use at all.”485 Likewise, the previous year he writes
to his editors, regarding the Cantos, “The one thing that is not wanted is uniformity in lots of
is also manifest in his translation “The Unmoving Cloud,” which is attributed both to “To-em-mei” in the title
and “T’ao Yuan Ming” in the concluding biographical matter. (Pound, Lustra, 43-44; 93-94).
484 Ezra Pound, trans., Ta Hio: The Great Learning (London: Stanley Nott, 1936). Standardized names for the book
include Daxue in contemporary Hanyu pinyin, Ta-Süeh in Wade-Giles, and Ta Hiue or Ta Hio in French EFEO, the
romanization previously employed by the French School of the Far East, or École française d’Extrême-Orient.
485 See Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 347. This statement reveals an under-explored aspect of
Pound’s transmission of lineage from Fenollosa: not just of reading Chinese characters, but of reading
Chinese characters and culture within the context of Japanese nationalism. In the same letter, Pound observes,
“Fenollosa wrote, I think justly, that Japan had kept the old sounds for the Odes long after the various
invasions from the north had ruined them in China.” (ibid., 347) This notion of Japan’s living preservation
of Chinese language and culture, despite being “ruined” by the wreckage of history in China itself, is rife for
critique. The error, however, is in ascribing such thinking to the muddled inauthenticity of American
orientalism, when it instead indexically reveals inter-Asian Pacific circulation of Chinese civilizational
discourse, and how Japan asserted itself as a nation within a cultural lineage inextricable from Sinocentrism.
(One should remember, for example, that Japan is the “origin of the sun” [Nihon 日本] only from the
perspective of China, “the middle country [Zhongguo 中国]”, looking eastward.) Fenollosa’s understanding of
the best of Chinese culture being transplanted to Japan is derived from the concept of kaihentai 華夷変態, or
“the transformation from civilized to barbarian and vice versa.” (Wai-ming Ng, Imagining China in Tokugawa
Japan: Legends, Classics, and Historical Terms (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), xv). The Japanese Edo-period Confucian
scholar Ogyū Sorai, for example, referred to himself as a “Japanese barbarian” (Nihonkoku ijin 日本国夷人)
and “eastern barbarian” (Tōi no hito 東夷の人) in relation to the “Central Civilization” (Chūka 中華) of
China (Ng, Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan, xv). However, with the Manchu takeover of China in the Qing
dynasty–a northern, semi-nomadic ethnic group–other Edo-period scholars began to understand Japan “as
the new center of Confucian order in East Asia”–indeed, a new China, or “middle country”–while others
were respectively “torn in their view of China between seeing it as a model and as ‘the Other.’” (Ng, Imagining
China in Tokugawa Japan, xv, xvii)
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places where a variant is intended. This also goes for hyphens in Chinese words. No need to
go into all Lin Yutang has been writing on how to help Europeans remember Chinese
names.”486
A transmission of lineage often implies certain exclusive or esoteric qualities, of
initiation into secret teachings or practices. Yet Pound’s pedagogical predisposition to
naming names, of providing a synthetic curriculum for comparative literary study, is
strikingly exoteric in approach, if still never populist. By offering a distinctly Poundian model
of poetry and literature for others to follow–and which was followed by successive
generations–he reorients his influences so that they become notable for the way in which
they are identifiable and activated within his own thinking.487 The same line of reasoning
may then well account for his ambivalence, or even hostility towards contemporary
aesthetic theorists.
In the absence of acknowledged theoretical predecessors, it is worth considering
who or what becomes illuminated in regards to Pound’s opposition toward it. Beyond
Pound’s stylistic debt to Pater in “Vorticism,” his emphasis on “intensive art” clearly
486 See Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 329, emphasis his. Lin Yutang was a prominent scholar,
novelist, and public intellectual. In the interwar 1930s he was well-known on both sides of the Pacific due to
his extensive publishing, English fluency, and western education in Germany and the United States. For a
discussion of his transcultural work, and his efforts to introduce Chinese language and culture to mainstream
American audiences, see Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011).
487 The direction of my thinking here follows Luis Borges in “Kafka and his Precursors.” In this short essay,
he offers a reading of Kafka which swerves from identifying aspects of his work within literary predecessors
to an argument that these predecessors become illuminated as such through their presence in Kafka. He
concludes: “If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken,
not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in
each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it;
that is to say, it would not exist…The word ‘precursor is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one
must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his
precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” (Jorge Luis Borges,
“Kafka and His Precursors,” in Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, trans. Ruth Simms (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1965), 108).
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signals a continuation of his ambivalent philosophical indebtedness to T.E. Hulme. As
noted earlier, one reason for Pound’s eventual disavowal of Hulme from the legacy of
imagism may well lie in Hulme’s turn towards the philosophy of Henri Bergson and
Wilhelm Worringer. Hulme met Bergson multiple times in Paris and Italy and was taken by
his ideas on intuition and the image, and later met Worringer in Germany.488 Like Hulme,
Worringer “believed that there was an intimate connection in every age between form in
art and attitudes in religion and philosophy.”489 Pound took a dim view toward Hulme’s
enthusiasm for these thinkers, commenting that during the latter days of Hulme’s salon
“His evenings were diluted with crap like Bergson.”490
Pound’s hostility towards Bergson’s brand of vitalism does not necessarily signal his
disinterest with vitalism altogether as a strain of philosophical thought. Rather, Pound’s
appraisal of Bergson stems from a fundamental disagreement concerning their respective
underlying aesthetic principles. In “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme explicates the
mechanical quality or complexity of the intellect, in opposition to a vital or organic quality
which escapes intellectual representation, and so which must be understood through
intuition. He elaborates:
Now this is all worked out in Bergson, the central feature of his whole philosophy.
It is all based on the clear conception of these vital complexities which he calls
488 Despite Hulme’s own position that his aesthetic philosophy was congruent with what Worringer
articulates in Abstraction and Empathy, it is argued his work actually reveals a synthesis of Worringer and Bergson.
One scholar, for example, argues that Hulme’s understanding of abstract art as a continuity of
representational art runs in opposition to Worringer’s understanding of abstraction as an absolute, which
consequently separates it from classical associations of emotional empathy; for this reader, the difference lays
in the influence of Bergson on his thinking. See Alun Jones, “T. E. Hulme, Wilhelm Worringer and the Urge
To Abstraction,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 1, no. 1 (1960): 1–6.
489 Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism., 62.
490 Ibid., 60.
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‘intensive’ as opposed to the other kind which he calls ‘extensive’, and the
recognition of the fact that the intellect can only deal with the extensive multiplicity.
To deal with the intensive you must use intuition. (82-83)
Strikingly, Pound uses this exact same dichotomy between intensive and extensive in
respect to art in “Vorticism”; at the same time, Pound reinterprets these concepts from a
positivist position, contending that one can indeed arrive at a scientific objectivity of
subjective phenomena. Pound’s advocacy of scientism as a method of aesthetics is attested
to in his definition of the Vortex in the first issue of Blast: “The vortex is the point of
maximum energy, / It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. / We use the
words ‘greatest efficiency’ in the precise sense—as used in a text book of MECHANICS.”491
Likewise, Pound begins ABC of Reading by observing, “We live in an age of science and
abundance,” and therefore “the proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is
the method of contemporary biologists.”492 In this way, Pound seeks to enunciate a
vitalism which is concordant with a concern for the “vital complexities” of an “intensive”
complex or subjectivity, while at the same time is antithetical to the “flaccidity” of
Bergson’s notion of intuition, asserting that the mechanical precision of the intellect can be
asserted within the subjective expression of the vorticist Image.
Moving from Hulme and Bergson to John Dewey, Pound had no documented
interest in him. He was, however, quite dismissive of William James, Dewey’s direct
philosophical predecessor. In contrast with Henry James, whom Pound lauds as one of the
greatest novelists of the nineteenth century, if not thegreatest English novelist,493 Pound
491 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; repr., New York, NY: New Directions, 2006), 153, emphasis his.
492 Ibid., 17.
493 A letter which Pound writes to H.L. Mencken in 1917 reflects his esteem for Henry James. Pound writes,
“I have enjoyed your Book of Prefaces…but lost my temper over your remarks on H. James.” Concerning
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avows, in a letter to his mother Isabel Pound, “Wm. James gt. [greatest] asset was being his
father’s son and Henry’s brother, but he probably died ignorant of both these
advantages.”494 Pound’s specific objections to Williams James are not altogether clear,
though his objections likely were not located in any doctrinal reason; rather, he rejected
him insofar as James, like Emerson, represented for Pound a certain kind of American
parochialism which he constitutionally rebelled against in favor of European
cosmopolitanism. A similar reductive suspicion of American intellectual culture would then
likely extend to Dewey.495
Nonetheless, the terms of engagement for Dewey, Bergson, Hulme, and Pound all
share remarkable overlaps, revealing the relative interpermeability of organicism, vitalism,
and indeed mechanism when transposed from the life sciences and into the sphere of
aesthetics. For example, in the chapter “The Natural History of Form” in Art as Experience,
Dewey asks the question, “What, then, are those formal conditions of artistic form that are
rooted deep in the world itself?” His answer is consistent with a prevailing organicist
argumentation that art is derived from an “interaction of environment,” whereby the
artwork reifies experience itself, or “effects its culmination in experience.” He writes,
Interaction of environment with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all
experience and from the environment come those checks, resistances, furtherances,
equilibria, which, when they meet with the energies of the organism in appropriate
ways, constitute form. The first characteristic of the environing world that makes
Mencken’s comparison of James to another contemporary writer, Pound admonishes, “you shouldn’t treat a
great man and a mutton-shank in one page as if there were no gulph between ’em.” (Pound, The Letters of Ezra
Pound, 1907–1941, 182)
494 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 593.
495 Ronald Bush suggests that Pound’s resistance to Emerson was rooted in a youthful rebellion against his
mother, who proudly identified herself as part of New England American stock; see “Pound, Emerson, and
Thoreau: The 'Pisan Cantos' and the Politics of American Pastoral,” Paideuma 34, no. 2/3 (2005): 271-292.
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possible the existence of artistic form is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before
poetry, painting, architecture and music exist. Were it not so, rhythm as an
essential property of form would be merely superimposed upon material, not an
operation through which material effects its own culmination in experience.”496
Yet Dewey’s assertion that biological “energies of the organism” and “rhythm in nature”
precede artistic form also anticipates the naturalist neo-vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari. In
A Thousand Plateaus, they propose formal “geologies” of their own which cohere with natural
history. In their concept of the “refrain,” they reconceptualize human artistic expression as
preceded by and an extension of the rhythmic territorializations and deterritorializations
which continuously occur within the natural world.497
For Dewey, his principle aesthetic disagreement with the vitalism of Bergson lays in
his evaluation of the latter as advocating for “a world of mere flux” which can only find
intervention through human consciousness.498 In contrast, Dewey contends that even the
flow of time, “as organization in change,” constitutes “growth, and growth signifies that a
varied series of change enters upon intervals of pause and rest; of completions that become
the initial points of new processes of development. Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it
lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.”499 Moving beyond this sticking point
(which Deleuze and Guattari arguably share, given their radical anti-anthropocentrism),
the terms of their respective engagements remain remarkably similar. The following is
Dewey, yet could also easily be mistaken at a glance for Bergson or Deleuze and Guattari:
496 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 147.
497 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
498 Dewey, Art as Experience, 16.
499 Ibid., 23.
191
All interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are
rhythms. There is ebb and flow, systole and diastolei ordered change. The latter
moves within bounds. To overpass the limits that are set is destruction and death,
out of which, however, new rhythms are built up. The proportionate interception
of changes establishes an order that is spatially, not merely temporally patterned:
like the waves of the sea, the ripples of sand where waves have flowed back and
forth, the fleecy and the black-bottomed cloud. Contrast of lack and fullness, of
struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated irregularity, form the
drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one.500
The “whirling flux of change” in the rhythms of ocean waves; “ripples of sand”; “the
fleecy and the black-bottomed cloud”; “new rhythms” which emerge from “destruction
and death.” A stylistic separation between these thinkers only appears when one’s eyes
alight upon the ponderous Deweyism “adjustment after consummated irregularity.”
Indeed, despite his intermittent protestations, Dewey all but invites such comparison to
Bergson, with “vital” and “vitality” appearing, undefined, fifty-nine times in Art as
Experience.
Dewey goes on to contend that the “outcome” of these rhythmic changes “is
balance and counterbalance. These are not static nor mechanical. They express power that
is intense because measured through overcoming resistance.”501 The intensity of the art
object is derived from its ability to overcome or transform the internal resistances of the
spectator or reader. Though he invokes the language of mechanical resistance to describe
this process, he distinguishes it from scientific mechanism proper, which would render the
world static, deterministic, and unidirectional in its causality. Here too we see a stylistic
resonance, this time between Dewey and Pound: though Pound likewise rejects the
mechanism which he identifies in Hulme’s understanding of intellect, he nonetheless
500 Ibid., 16.
501 Ibid.
192
argues objective measurements of mechanical “efficiency” can be obtained through
comparative literary study. Though this presence of scientific mechanism is more
attenuated in Pound than his organicist-vitalism, it is never entirely absent or reconciled
either.502
Now comes a point concerning Pound’s differentiation of vorticism from imagism
which demands interpretation. If Pound’s essay “Vorticism” organizationally begins as a
record of Pound’s earlier thoughts on imagism–epitomized by “In a Station of the
Metro”–and then continues on to develop his later, organicist-vitalist reconfiguration of
imagism into vorticism, then it is significant that this latter half of the essay offers nopoetic
counterpart or example with which to elucidate his understanding of the Vortex as a
“radiant node or cluster.” In fact, Pound does not reference literary works here at all;
instead, he invokes the engagement of his fellow vorticists in the visual arts: the paintings
of Edward Wadsworth and Wyndham Lewis and the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
and Jacob Epstein.
On the one hand, this decision by Pound signals a shift from the singularly poetic
concerns of imagism to the truly transmedial concerns of vorticism–a position emphasized in
the statement, “What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist
art.”503 On the other hand, it begs the question why Pound does not illustrate his thinking
502 See, for example, his later interest in the abstract forms of technical “machine art,” as discussed in
Williams (“Machine/Art,” in The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (Yale
University Press, 2014), 86–128).
503 Like Pound, Dewey argues for art which emphasizes the primary or dominant qualities specific to that
medium. He contends that poetry ought to be “poetic,” architecture “architectural,” drama “dramatic,”
sculptures “sculptural,” visual art “pictorial,” and literature “literary,” with each of these words “designating
the quality best effected” within that particular medium. Moreover, he regards this approach as the correct
interpretation of Walter Pater’s saying–often repeated by Pound–that all “arts constantly aspire to the
condition of music.” Yet Dewey explicitly disagrees with imagism’s primary emphasis on the pictorial, arguing
it should otherwise be the provenance of visual art, and that what is “poetic” about poetry is precisely its lyric
193
on Vorticism with the example of the Chinese “ideogram.” Instead, he cites “Oread” by
H.D., recently published in Blast 1. Indeed, the question could be raised at this juncture if
Chinese language should even be considered a relevant example of Pound’s vorticist Image,
given its striking absence from his essay.
Such a position becomes thoroughly muddled when we consider the contents of
Blast 1 and 2, which were published respectively in July 1914 and 1915. In Blast 1, China
only briefly appears as a topos in a brief series of “Epitaphs” for the poets Fu I and Li Po.504
In Blast 2, however, a significant amount of Pound’s contributions and references to him
are concerned with China. For instance, in the third section of “Chronicles,” Pound
peripatetically reviews Lawrence Binyon’s Flight of the Dragon, published in 1911. Pound
lauds Binyon’s assessments of East Asian art, pulling quotes from the book and reprinting
them as a series of aphoristic statements. Pound especially favors those elements of Binyon
which are vitalist in nature, as when he reprints in all caps the pronouncement, “FOR
INDEED IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL THAT THE SUBJECT - MATTER SHOULD REPRESENT OR BE
LIKE ANYTHING IN NATURE; ONLY IT MUST BE ALIVE WITH A RHYTHMIC VITALITY
OF ITS OWN.”505 At the same time, Pound ironically reprimands Binyon for what he sees
capacity to plumb the interior depths and processes of human subjectivity: “Prose and drama often attain the
picturesque, and poetry the genuinely pictorial, that is the communication of the visible scene of things. But
in these arts, it is subdued and secondary. The effort to make it primary, as in ‘imagism,’’ doubtless taught
poets something new, but it was such a forcing of the media that it could endure only as an emphasis, not as
a dominant value. The obverse truth is the fact that, when paintings go beyond the scene and spectacle to tell
a story, they become ‘literary.’” (Dewey, Art as Experience, 229, 235) Though Dewey is very much engaged
with modernist aesthetic theory, his artistic examples often skew older, with particular attention to Romantic
poets. This incongruity is less surprising when one considers the considerable span of Dewey’s life and career:
he was born in 1859, before the American Civil War, and published Art as Experience at the venerable age of
seventy-five. My reading of Art as Experience identifies imagism as Dewey’s only direct engagement with
modernist art and letters proper–a point rarely if ever addressed by scholarship. (His second most
contemporary reference being the post-impressionist fin-de-sieclé painter Paul Cézanne.)
504 Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1 (1914; repr., Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 48.
505 Wyndham Lewis, Blast 2 (1915; repr., Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 86.
194
as a compulsion to “justify Chinese intelligence by dragging it a little nearer to some
Western precedent”—in other words, for applying a Eurocentric critical apparatus to
Chinese culture, rather than considering China on its own terms.506
A few pages earlier in the magazine, Wyndham Lewis remarks, concerning Pound,
that “in his steel net of impeccable technique he has lately caught Li Po. Energy of a
discriminating Element.”507 The “energy” described in the second sentence would seem to
be Pound–yet the paratactic ambiguity of the sentence also allows for the subject to be Li
Po, a judgment of which Pound would approve. Finally, an advertisement for Pound’s
recently published Cathay appears in Blast’s backmatter directly below a Vorticist drawing.508
Though Chinese poetry and art were perhaps not understood by Pound as inherently
vorticist at this time, they were also clearly not seen as incompatible with vorticism, given
how closely they hovered within Blast’s radius.
In February 1915 Pound published “Imagisme and England,” where he states that
imagist theories of poetry “have sought the force of Chinese ideograms without knowing
it.”509 Subsequently, his first Chinese translation from Fenollosa, “Exile’s Letter,” appeared
in Poetry’s March 1915 issue. At this moment, Pound’s work on his vorticist writings and
506 Qian speculates that The Flight of the Dragon may be another key influence upon Pound’s vorticism. In the
final analysis, however, Pound’s vorticism and his theory of the ideogram are argued by Qian to be separate,
parallel developments. Representative of this position, he observes, “We have reason to believe that Pound’s
ambivalence toward Binyon around 1915 had more to do with his exchanges with Fenollosa than with his
engagement in the Vorticist enterprise” (Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art (Charlottesville, VA:
University of Virginia Press, 2003), 144).
507 Wyndham Lewis, Blast 2, 82.
508 Ibid., 103.
509 Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (1999; repr., New York:
Routledge, 2014), 40.
195
Chinese translations were both at their height. Even so, Pound only recognizes a
correspondence between vorticism and in his interests in China in retrospect. In 1916, he
writes in response to an article on vorticism in Reedy’s Mirror, “As an active and informal
association it might be said that Lewis supplied the volcanic force, Brzeska the animal
energy, and perhaps that I had contributed a certain Confucian calm and reserve.510
Nonetheless, Pound’s understanding of the Chinese character as nonrepresentational image
only came to full fruition with the 1919 publication of Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica, a work whose final shape was as reflective of
Pound’s heavy editorial hand as his later collaboration with Eliot on The Waste Land.511
In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, Christopher Bush convincingly argues
that by the nineteenth century China had become “a topos, called upon to represent
something both radically other and uncomfortably familiar, something banished to
Europe’s archaic, primitive past, and an image of, if not its present, then its possible
future.”512 If China served as a way to contextualize and historicize the western world,
then the site of this contextualization was that of Chinese characters, where language,
culture, and history were understood to have been “closely intertwined from the very
start.”513 This western discourse around Chinese writing is one which links the seeming
510 Pound, Pavannes and Divagations, 245–46.
511 The extent to which Pound reshapes Fenollosa’s essay can be seen in Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (Fordham
University Press, 2008). This edition restores the original essay as it appeared in manuscript form before
Pound’s cuts and line edits.
512 Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
513 Ibid., 6.
196
rigidity of a Chinese character with “constraints, petrification, and stasis, as well as its
natural affinity to tyranny”—designations which are accordingly juxtaposed by the
“‘normative teleology’ of Western characteristics: dynamic, historical, temporal,
alphabetic.”514
There is a fine point of distinction regarding this matter for Fenollosa, who argued
for a reversal of the above characteristics attributed to western alphabetic writing and
Chinese written characters. Unlike orthodox orientalist understandings of the time,
Fenollosa’s critique is not directed towards China and Chinese writing, but rather western
writing within America’s benighted universities, which he charges as having reached a
point of “petrification” and “stasis.” For Fenollosa, it is precisely within the Chinese
written language that possibility for dynamic creativity still lies immanent and capable of
being “transplanted” into the soil of Western poetry. An understanding of Fenollosa’s
notion of the vitality of Chinese writing can be derived from his understanding of the
sentence “man sees horse” (人見馬). Fenollosa argues, “The Chinese method proceeds
upon natural suggestion. First, there stands the man upon his two legs. Second, his eye
moves through space, —a bold figure— represented by moving legs drawn under the
modified picture of an eye. Third, at the end of the eye’s journey, stands the horse upon
his four legs.”515 In consideration of this “thought-picture,” Fenollosa notes that the
language signs of Chinese writing do not just simply convey an idea, but do so “vividly
and concretely,” for “legs belong to all these characters: they are alive. The group holds
514 Ibid., 9, 18–19.
515 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan
Stalling, and Lucas Klein (Fordham University Press, 2008), 80.
197
something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.”516
Central to Fenollosa’s interest in Chinese characters is the notion that they are
rooted not in pictures of things but in pictures of actions, and as such are not nouns but are
in fact “verbal idea[s] of action,” with the radicals of the characters “really short-hand
pictures of actions or processes.”517 This idea of Chinese characters and grammar being
continuously active serves as Fenollosa’s foundational argument that the Chinese language
is more primal, “vital,” and connected to a nondualistic reality and nature, where “thing
and action are not formally separated” but instead “alive and plastic.”518 The import of this
statement in terms of an ars poetica is that the English poet can glean inspiration from a
language so charged and immanently poetic at its own point of inception. Moreover, in
contrast to the English language, whose etymological roots are only apparent to scholars
and poets who “piece together our diction, as best they may, out of forgotten fragments,
the broken coral that strews our sand,” Fenollosa contends that the Chinese character “only
becomes the richer and the more consciously luminous from age to age.”519
Given Fenollosa’s thoughts on the luminosity of the Chinese language, with its
ability to reveal what lays hidden from view, and its vital, transformative properties, it
becomes clear why Pound would consider it the pre-eminent model of language for
modern times. And yet, having attained such insight, Pound continues to piecemeal his
Chinese character into combinations of intuitively realized ideographs–what Huang calls
516 Ibid.
517 Ibid., 81.
518 Ibid., 90.
519 Ibid., 96, 97.
198
“his ingenious etymosinological method.”520 As with the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish,
the Chinese character undergoes a process of decomposition and dissection in Pound’s
laboratory, and subsequently something has been learned. The exercise is akin to a
deconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) so as to reveal in
its prehistory the time-lapse photography of Eadweard Muybridge’s Nude Descending a Staircase
(1887). In both cases the final expressionist image is formed not through impression but
juxtaposition and superimposition, so that discrete elements or moments in time become
integral and whole. In this way, the Chinese character functions in the same way as the
vortex of Pound’s vorticist project, as when he asserts in Blast 1, “All the past that is vital, all
the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.”521
It is this final elaboration of Pound’s scientistic conception of the Image as Chinese
ideogram which remains with him throughout his career, as seen in his pronouncement in
ABC of Reading that “The first definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to
literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character.”522
Ultimately, Pound’s arrival at a conception of the Chinese character as having an essentially
vital nature, and of the vorticist Image as a vitalist reworking of imagism, centers upon the
influence of Fenollosa’s philosophical conception of the Chinese character. Working from
this premise, one can read the discourses of vitalism and ideogrammic poetics in Pound’s
work in tandem with and against one another, opening up fresh readings and lines of
520 Yunte Huang, “Ezra Pound, Made in China,” Paideuma 42 (2015): 43.
521 Lewis, Blast 1, 153.
522 Pound, ABC of Reading, 18.
199
inquiry into the pre-eminence of the Chinese character for Pound and their hypothetical
meanings as vorticist Images.
One area of Pound’s work worthy of such a reconsideration is his redoubtable
dictum to “make it new.” Often employed as a metonymic shorthand for much of
modernist poetry as a whole, this phrase first emerges from his creative interpretation of a
line from the Confucian book The Great Learning. As previously discussed, Pound rendered it
as Ta Hio: The Great Learning, working from a bilingual edition of James Legge’s 1893
translation and Guillaume Pauthier’s French translation from the 1850s.523 He also made
use of Robert Morrison’s four-volume Chinese-English dictionary to arrive at intuitive
ideogrammic translations of its Chinese characters.524 Armed with these three reference
texts, he renders one passage as follows: “In letters of gold on T’ang’s bathtub: / AS THE
SUN MAKES IT NEW / DAY BY DAY MAKE IT NEW / YET AGAIN MAKE IT NEW.”525
In Pound’s configuration of this line, “it” refers not to poetry but rather to life itself,
which one is exhorted to make new just as the sun makes each day brand new. However,
given that Pound first utilizes this phrase as the title of his 1934 book of essays Make It New,
this exhortation slides from the vital renovation of life in general to the practice of
modernist poetry in particular, along with the vitalist poetic energies of the past which
523 Cheadle observes that Pound’s engagement with Chinese writing did not move beyond the Fenollosa
notebooks until the 1930s, and that an earlier 1928 translation of Da xue “is not based on the Chinese text at
all, but is a very close retranslation” of Pauthier’s French text (Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations,
33–34).
524 Pound would only go on to use R.H. Matthews’ more standard Chinese-English dictionary while at
St. Elizabeth’s after World War II. Discussing the importance of Morrison’s dictionary, and the “imagistic
power” of its definitions for Pound, Cheadle observes, “In the Confucian translations, Morrison is Pound’s
true Beatrice” (ibid., 38–39).
525 Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, Edited by Richard Sieburth (Library of America, 2003), 620.
200
have retained an inherent dynamism and remain, in Pound’s estimation, eternally new.526
It is precisely this sentiment which he expresses another way in ABC of Reading as “Literature
is news that STAYS news.”527 As is typical for Pound, he does not attempt to conceal the
source of this injunction, instead choosing to print the original Chinese characters on the
cover of the first edition of the book, the English title serving in turn as en-face translation.
In this way, the characters mark not only Pound’s own instrumental aim of providing a
pedagogical model for modernization, but also demonstrate how Pound’s own aesthetic
thinking is “made new” each day in his exposure to Chinese poetics and Fenollosa’s
invention of the “ideogram.”
The characters chosen by Pound as the ideogrammic counterpart to “make it new”
are themselves worth discussing. In Legge’s original text, the passage appears as 茍日新，
日日新，又日新 ju ri xin, ri ri xin, you ri xin. Rather than excerpt 日日新 ri ri xin, or “each
day new,” what appears on the cover of Make It New is 新日日新 xinri rixin. As Park
observes of its later appearance in The Cantos, “The ideogram for sun is repeated twice (‘day
by day’) and flanked on either end with the repeated character for ‘renew,’ the ideogram
‘hsin,’ which Pound reads as its component characters for underbrush and ax.”528
Although the character for xin 新 does indeed appear before ririxin 日日新 in the source
text, it is clearly part of the previous phrase. Moreover, the reproduction of these characters
526 For an account of how Pound associates “make it new” at various points with fascism and
Neoconfucianism along with this aesthetic imperative, see
Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 62–171,
doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226077901.001.0001.
527 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; repr., New York, NY: New Directions, 2006), 29.
528 Park, Apparitions of Asia, 53.
201
in Make It New have a subtle error which reflects this: an extra stroke next to xin 新, one
which duplicates the punctuation in Legge. This mistake is repeated in its appearance across
Pound’s other work, including The Cantos. Hugh Kenner observes that the comma which
appears in these characters serves as a textual artifact of Dorothy Pound mistakenly copying
the punctuation marks in Legge’s bilingual translation.529 The question which Kenner
doesn’t raise, however, is why Pound would choose to deliberately combine these
fragments together into a single phrase. Whereas the original text builds rhetorical weight
through repetition, Pound’s excerpting of the characters creates a new, palindromic
structure. Recast in this way, Pound makes new the original Chinese text by converting it
into a form both purely visual and nonrepresentational, more concerned with the visual
symmetry of the Image than any potential loss of linguistic meaning.
Despite the proliferation of “make it new” across many of Pound’s texts, North
contends that it was only after Kenner isolated it and brought his critical attention to bear
upon it that “make it new” became promulgated within the scholarly community as the
general ethos of high modernism.530 If so, Kenner’s selection establishes the canonical
phrasing of a sentiment which echoes earlier, similar statements, as when Dewey observes
that imagism “doubtless taught poets something new.”531 Regardless, it is clear that
Pound’s creative reworking of this phrase has taken on its own afterlife. One need only
look at the cover of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, edited by Weinberger
and published in 2004 (misprint finally corrected), to witness how Pound’s ideogrammic
529 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 448.
530 Ibid., 169.
531 Dewey, Art as Experience, 235. Make It New was published in 1934, the same year as Art as Experience.
202
meaning-making continues to loom over and “make new” American modernist studies and
its understanding of Chinese poetry.532
If “make it new” serves as an example of how a canonical truism of American
modernism may be reexamined in light of its vorticist Image, a return to the ideogram
frontispiece of Cathay which initiated this chapter can likewise illuminate aspects of Pound’s
work which have lain unaddressed. Pound discovers this character yao 耀 in Fenollosa’s
manuscript for The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, where it appears in the
compound word yueyao 月耀, or “moonlight,” and in isolation is translated via
ideogrammic method as “ray.” The poem in which it appears serves as the first example of
ideogrammic translation of Chinese poetry in Fenollosa’s text.533 Perhaps it is for this
reason that Pound becomes so enamored with it. In any case, the character continues to
appear in Pound’s books and correspondences. Beyond Fenollosa’s text and the cover of
Cathay, this character is used by Pound as the exemplary model for ideographic translation
in a letter to Katue Kitasono. He writes, “You can send translation, but in each case we will
want EACH character explained. As in the poem in my edition of Fenollosa’s Chinese
written character. (Moon Rays etc.).”534 The character also precedes Cantos LII–LXI, which
are often referred to as “The China Cantos,” serving as an interstitial break which sets the
532 Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New York: New Directions, 2003).
533 Complicating Pound’s point, this poem is in fact a Japanese kanshi 漢詩, literally “Chinese poem”: a
single quatrain verse written in Chinese by Japanese educated elite. It is not Tang-dynasty verse, but instead
was written by the Japanese Heian poet Sugawara no Michizane 菅原 道真.
534 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Japan (Black Swan Books, 1987), 56.
203
poems off from the previous section. In the en-face table of contents in The Cantos, the
character is here referred to as “Rays ideogram from Fenollosa collection.”535
Cheadle minimizes Pound’s engagement with Chinese characters before the 1930s,
as previously discussed, while Xie contends that Pound does not begin to use Chinese
characters in his own creative work until their appearance in “The China Cantos.”536 Such
an assertion, however, fails to take into account the character’s appearance in his
correspondence or its paratextual meaning in Cathay. Moreover, it does not account for how
Pound’s translations, criticism, and poetry are all deeply imbricated with one another. Xie
himself attests to this point, elsewhere observing that “there seems to be no fundamental
distinction” between translation, adaptation, or original work for Pound.537
Beyond Pound’s seemingly arbitrary affinity for this character, it is compelling to
note that its meaning, “ray,” has resonances in both the Chinese original and its English
translation with the word “radiant”–as in Pound’s definition of the Vortex in “Vorticism”
as “a radiant node or cluster.” Pound intimates the import of such resonances in his 1938
article “Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius),” where he contends, “There are categories of
ideogram not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided really by the feel of their
forms, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant.”538 If some characters in “the feel of
their forms” have the categorical distinction of being “radiant,” it then follows the “Rays
535 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 254.
536 Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry, 22.
537 Ibid., 229.
538 Ezra Pound, Selected Prose (New Directions, 1973), 93.
204
ideogram” would be the most radiant of them all. Through its serendipitous connection to
the intensive, vitalist radiance of the “vortex,” we now arrive at the tantalizing, yet also
most likely argument that this character serves as a vorticist Image for the Vortex itself.
An equally compelling reading which compounds upon this argument suggests this
character has certain pseudonymous qualities for Pound. “Ray” was his childhood
nickname, as can be seen in the first illustration in Kenner’s The Pound Era, where a class
photo is captioned “Little ‘Ray’ Pound.”539 Given this, there is the temptation to read the
reference to this character in The Cantos possessively: not as the awkwardly pluralized “Rays
ideogram,” but instead “Ray’s ideogram,” deictically referring to Pound himself. Moreover,
it must be stressed here that this kind of punning or playing with names appears with
regularity in Pound’s personal correspondences. In the closing to a letter to Katue Kitasono,
a Japanese poet with whom he had extensive correspondence, Pound refers to himself with
the appellation “Ez’ Po’ / (debased form of Rihaku).”540 This Chinese character thus
becomes not only emblematic of the vorticist Image of the Vortex, but also a vorticist,
nonrepresentational image of Pound. As such, this character should be considered of a
piece with other vorticist portraits of Pound, including Gaudier-Brzeska’s “Hieratic Head of
Ezra Pound” (1914), Alvin Langdon Coburn’s “Vortograph of Ezra Pound” (1917), and
539 Kenner, The Pound Era, 9.
540 Pound, Ezra Pound and Japan, 34. Starting in 1940 Pound also affectionately, if problematically referred to
Kitasono himself at times as “Kit Kat.” (ibid., 104). As observed by North in The Dialect of Modernism, Pound and
Eliot’s regular use of the racialized appellations “Brer Rabbit” and “Old Possum” in their correspondence also
reflects this practice (Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford
University Press, 1994)).
205
Pound’s own “Ezra Pound / Henri Gaudier-Brzeska” monogram, adorning the cover page
of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916).541
If, as Pound observes, William Carlos Williams may “get something slogging
away” by himself that would otherwise be missed by the vorticists, then what becomes
clear is this slog through the vitalist-organicist development of vorticism and the Chinese
character likewise allows for a reading of the Rays ideogram which has been missed by
those working more narrowly on the role of either China or Vorticism for Pound, without
proper attention to how these parallel projects are in turn explicated by the other. This
reading thus serves as a path in which one can approach the larger interconnected regimes
of signification which reign over modernist texts, forming new networks of meaning
which radiate from and collapse into the vortex of modernism.
541 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir.
206
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