America’s Reading of Nature and the Panoramic Gaze of the Fu

Abstract

Abstract From about 1913, the year of the Armory Show in New York, American poetry was subject to an increasingly international influence. Marianne Moore had, before that time, already begun her vast reading on Chinese subjects. Her poet contemporaries were similarly delving into scholarly texts on the Far East. From 1901 to1905, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H. D. were all at the University of Pennsylvania and reading widely in Eastern literatures. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded in 19 I 2 and published by Harriet Monroe in Chicago, and Pound, as London editor, was promoting lmagism in its pages. Of the several imperatives of this new poetic practice, which was characterized by clarity, precision, and brevity, one feature was decidedly not in keeping with American poetic traditions. In a letter to William Carlos Williams of 21 October 1908, Pound articulated an early version of what became the Imagist Manifesto.