동양화에서 색채를 배우다: 월러스 스티븐스의 습작 시절

Abstract

This paper purports to deliver a discovery by the author regarding a piece of work in Wallace Stevens'' juvenilia. It thus also purports to present an evidence on the pervasiveness of East Asian influence in the development of British and American modernist poetry. Stevens has not been often discussed as closely associated with East Asian art and literature. However, “Colors,” a short poem written in 1909, reveals that the poet was impressed by the use of vivid colors in Chinese and Japanese visual arts and tried to imitate the effects in words in his own work. Particularly, this paper discloses that the words in “Colors” have come from a book by Laurence Binyon called Painting in the Far East. Binyon was the curator of East Asian art at the British Museum at that time, and he was the person who introduced emerging Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and H. D. to East Asian art and literature. His book, first published in 1908, contained one of the earliest accounts of the history of art in East Asia written in Europe and North America. Stevens did not personally know Binyon, and the fact that he obtained the book and read it corroborates the thesis that many young poets, at either end of the Atlantic, were interested in East Asian art early in the twentieth century,