Transnational Poetics and Modernist Archives: Ezra Pound's Confucian Odes

Abstract

Influential in Anglo-American modernism for his poetic experimentation, Ezra Pound is a figure instrumental in developing new poetic techniques and absorbing poetic traditions then-alien to Anglophone readers. His life-long engagement with Chinese materials is well documented in his literary works such as Cathay (1915) and the Cantos. He also translated the Chinese classic Four Books, in both English and Italian. In 1954, Pound published a print edition, Shih-ching: The Classical Anthology Defined by Confucius with Harvard University Press. It comprises his English rendering of the 305 odes in the Shijing, widely regarded as the most canonical collection of Chinese poetry. What remains largely unexplored is that beginning in the 1930s, Pound had been developing an apparatus to account for the oral and musical dimension of classical Chinese poetry. This led to his intended (but eventually unfulfilled) publication of a comprehensive scholarly edition, the files for which are housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. This thesis establishes Pound’s Confucian Odes project as both a critical and a poetic work by closely engaging with Pound’s notebooks, drafts, and manuscripts. These unpublished materials will be compared with the published version, read along with his source texts related to the Shijing. Pound’s critical reading of the Shijing will be analysed together with its reception histories, including the commentary traditions from ancient to modern China, as well as in European sinology from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Pound’s Confucian Odes project is the product of a literary, intellectual, and cultural history associated with multiple interpretive horizons, merging with his experience in early- to mid-twentieth-century Europe and the United States, offering a transnational outlook on modernism and modernity as an aesthetic-historical concept.