Imagism of Chinese Poem: A Literary Study on Ezra Pound’s Poetry

Zixi Li

doi:10.23969/jijac.v2i1.5126

Abstract

Imagism aims at creating poetry as art, pursuing the clarity and beauty of language, and implying personal emotions via images. While Imagism brings the most influential change in English literature, Chinese traditional poetry with its unique cultural and historical style stands out in world literature with rich emotional expression through images. This literary study compares Ezra Pound’s imagist poems with classical Chinese poetry, reviewing his translations of Chinese. To scrutinize the data, a qualitative research method that covers document analysis techniques was implemented comprehensively. The research reveals that Pound’s translated Chinese poems build a strong bond between the two cultures. Chinese traditional poems and Imagism poems share their love of descriptive language, a passion for accurate detail creation, joyfulness towards metaphor, analogy, personification, and other writing techniques, while they all conserve their own art form and identities Keywords: Chinese poem, Ezra Pound, Imagism

Highlights

Three thousand and five hundred years ago, the first collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, established the style of Chinese traditional poems and the application of the power of words
Imagism aims at creating poetry as art, pursuing the clarity and beauty of language, and implying personal emotions via images
Chinese poems are the primary data and it is in line with Cropley (2021) says Narratives most obviously involve speaking or writing, but they can be based on other forms of communication such as diaries, literary or journalistic works, audio or videotapes, or artworks

Summary

Introduction

Three thousand and five hundred years ago, the first collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, established the style of Chinese traditional poems and the application of the power of words. Ezra Pound, one of the greatest Imagism poets, led a revolution of the beauty of words in the Western World. Imagism aims at creating poetry as art, pursuing the clarity and beauty of language, and implying personal emotions via images. Ezra Pound’s long adventure with Chinese poetry marks a linguistic and cultural crossroads for this twentieth-century American poet’s cosmopolitan English and the ancient written language of classical Chinese poetry. Pound encountered Chinese poems in London in around 1909, he was attracted to Chinese poems and translated a lot of Chinese poems later (Xie, 2015)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion