1. Introduction 1
2. Ezra Pound and Imagism 2
2.1 Ezra Pound 2
2.2 Imagism ………………………………………………………… …………...….. .4
3. Imagistic features of Pound's poetry 5
3.1 The use of Image 5
3.1.1 Image progress…..……………………………………………………………… ……6
3.1.2 Image superposition………………………………………………………………….. 8
3.1.3 Image juxtaposition………………………………………………………………...…9
3.2 Concise Language………………..………………….…………………………...…….10
3.3 Musical Rhythm ...……………………………………………………………………..11
4. Influence of Pound’s poetry 12
4.1 The impact on domestic literature ...…………… …………………………………… 13
4.2 The impact on foreign literature ...………….…………………………………………14
5. Conclusion 16
Acknowledgement. 17
Reference 18
1．Introduction
Imagism was a movement in the early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry.11
As the father of Modernism, Ezra Pound plays an important role in Poetry modernization process. Therefore, we can get a clear understanding of imagism poems by studying Pound’s poems and translation works. The thesis will focus on studying image to analysis Ezra Pound’s poems. According to Pound's Imagist poems and other predecessors’ studies of his works, this thesis will summarize the language characteristics of Pound’s poetry and analysis his imagist poetry style, so as to provide some theoretical concept from the view of reading, understanding and appreciating modern English poetry, thus making it easier for Chinese readers to appreciate English poetry.
The first part summarizes Ezra Pound’s life and theoretical basis of Imagism. The second part, as analysis of Pound's poetry, departs into three parts—the use of image, concise language and musical rhythm. It introduces three kinds of combination of images, and uses Pound’s poems to explain the combination of images. The third part is about the influence of Pound poetry on domestic and foreign literature
2. Ezra Pound and Imagism
As the father of modernism which is the main stream of literature in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound definitely plays a predominant role in the evolution of modernist poetry. Its starting point is Imagism.
Ezra Pound’s Imagist theory is mainly based on the aesthetic theories proposed by W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme. Yeats is famous for a symbolist who emphasizes subjective conception and imaginative association，but this school tends to lapse into sentimentality; Ford is famous for an impressionist who emphasizes objective writing with clarity and precision, but this school tends to lapse into the level of description. Pound absorbs the strengths of Yeat’s subjectivity and Ford’s objectivity
and finds a way to make natural objects convey subjective emotion by virtue of association of the mind.
2.1 Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound(1885一1972)was born in Hally, Idaho, in October, 1885.Then he attended Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania，where he majored in romance Philology while reading through a large Portion of classical and European literature. Dissatisfied with the genteel tradition and Popular romanticism dominating the American literary tastes，Pound moved to Europe in1908一first to London，then to Paris，and finally to Rapallo, Italy. In 1909，Pound met W. B. Yeats and Ford Madox Ford. He was greatly influenced by these two and tried to combine Yeat’s symbolism with Ford’s impressionism. About the same period of time, Pound got in touch with T. E. Hulme and became interested in his Poetic theory.
All these ideas became the theoretical basis of the well-known Imagist and Vortieist Movement. Later，inspired by American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa’s theory on the Chinese writing characters，Pound proposed the Ideogramic Method which was based on the chief principles of the Imagist and Vorticist Movement. As the advocate and leader of the movement Pound exerted a great influence on the Imagist poetry writers. Pound also attempted to combine poetry with music, painting and scu1pture.Vortieism was such a typical example.
Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
Pound is not only a poet, but also a translator, essayist and literary critic. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry which are stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos, which was regarded as poetic masterpiece of the twentieth century. He is really an original and creative poet in the twentieth century, a literary giant who plays a prominent role in the development of modernist poetry.
2.2 Imagism
Imagism was a poetic movement which flourished in London between 1910 and 1917 and had an enduring and pervasive influence on English-language poetry in the twentieth century.
The Imagists published four annual anthologies from 1914 to 1917, with a final anthology in 1930. They were led by Ezra Pound who first called them “Les Imagists”, choosing a French term to associate the group with the various French avant-garde movements which became the Roger Fry’s influential Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. The group included Hilda Doolittle, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, and, marginally, D. H. Lawrence, but they had only a loose and shifting affiliation and it was mainly Pound’s talents as a promoter and critic that gave a semblance of unity.
Pound’s favored spelling of Imagists was a gesture of homage to the first school of modern poets, the symbolists, whose best-known members were Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, but Pound criticized the French Symbolists as often as he praised them. The first principle of Imagism was “Direct treatment of the thing” [3]72, clearly in contrast to Mallarme’s famous dictum that to name a thing was to take away half the pleasure and whereas Verlaine in his “Art of Poetry” advised an “indefinite music”. Pound spoke for an “absolute rhythm”, a rhythm that is in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed.
Nonetheless, Pound’s ascorbic but well-judged criticism of his contemporaries, his accurate sense of what was good in verse, and his own aphoristic brilliance, gave this small movement (which was not really even a movement outside of Pound’s rhetoric) a formative role in defining the twentieth-century poet as someone who was in the intellectual avant-garde, purifying the language of the tribe, spurning flaccid and self-important and merely derived patterns of language use, and generally breaking with the idea of fixed metrical rules. Many of these principles were clearly articulated in the essay “Imagism” in Poetry (March 1913) which was offered as an interview-cum-
report by F. S. Flint but shows the hand of Pound throughout. According to Flint, the three principles of Imagism were:
“1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. ” [4]12
In an essay “A Few Don’ts by An Imagist” by Pound in the same issue offers a definition of the Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” [5]54, the key point being the compression of intellectual and emotional experience into an instant. He goes on to offer his own set of “Don’ts”:
“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
Don’t use such an expression as “dim land of peace”. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably cliff cult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line. ” [6]31
3. Imagistic Features of Pound's Poetry
Imagist poetry has three distinctive artistic characteristics. First, the Imagist poems request to convey the complex imagery directly, use sculpture and painting in the performance of imagery. It objects to musical and mystery object to lyrics. It advances the “Do not say” and “Do not you narrative” [6]9, only to show without comment. Second, the Imagist poems use concise language, no adjectives and qualifier, no decorative “lace” and flaunting words. It writes short lines, with imagery. Third, the Imagist poetry Images focus on the intrinsic rhythm of imagery combination, blend the imagery and the contained idea.
3.1 The use of Image
The word “Image” used in the field of literature is derived from the theory of Chinese poetry. It is an important linguistic terms which have been widely used in Chinese poetry. Therefore, when people refer to “image” in literature, it also refers to “image” poetry. Poetry image is the basic constituent element of poetry. It is the soul and essence features of poetry, and it plays a vital role in poetry.
Pound’s work as poet, critic，editor，and promoter of the new style was crucial to its initial period，in the decade around the First World War，and what was most essential to his conception of what was truly modern was a single word: Image. Pound’s best poems were assured achievement in the Imagist Movement when literature in English became recognizably modern. The modern revolution in literary style came from a main impulse一focus on the image.
Aesthetic theorist and imagist poet T. E. Hulme must be credited with the initial emphasis on the image，for he first formulated the doctrine that “Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language.”2 It was also Pound who showed in practice how far this definition could be carried into the making of short and then longer poems. Pound emphasized the concentration of intellectual and emotional content possible in a poetic image, though it mirrored only a brief moment of experience. He took the image to be the poet’s “primary pigment” and stressed the hardness, or concreteness, of sensory language, telling poets to “Go in fear of abstractions”. Besides concreteness, Pound stressed exactness of diction, the mot just of Flaubert, and clarity, and “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome”. Thus, along with the image emerged free verse, newly understood as an appropriate organic rhythm, suited to the mood of the individual poem.
In short, Pound’s Imagism was intended to carry symbolism forward towards a greater poetic realism, keeping the poet’s vision always in touch with the world of his senses, holding firmly to the principle that truth should be visible in things, rather than in visible beyond them.
As we all know ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese haiku had an important influence on Pound, especially the ancient Chinese poetry. Pound didn’t just pay attention to the
‘exotic surface’ of the Chinese language but its linguistic nature and the abstract feelings that lie behind it. He not only translated lots of Chinese poems but also learned the useful and particular writing techniques. It can be seen clearly the imitation of the style of Chinese poetry from Pound’ poems.
In the following text I will focus on three types of combination of image--image progress, image superposition and image juxtaposition. These three modes of combination of image are very typical East or Chinese-style image, which is characterized by only using nouns rather than verbs. This image processing techniques in ancient poetry in China is nothing unusual or surprising. And they are also wildly used in Pound’s poetry and become his representative features.
3.1.1 Image Progress
Image progress is a combination of images which structured in accordance with the objective rule. It is a common writing technique used by ancient Chinese poets. For example, the famous Chinese poetry《敕勒歌》：
“敕勒川，阴山下，天似穹庐，笼盖四野。
天苍苍、野茫茫，风吹草低见牛羊。”
In this poem, the author wrote from the mountains to near grass, from the sky to earth. He ranged the images under the rule of direction--from far to near. Therefore the author could make the meaning of this poem very clear.
Ezra Pound successfully used Image progress writing technique in his poems. Take Pound’s poem “Salutation” for example:
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
-----by Ezra Pound “Salutation”
In this poem, Pound first wrote the happy “fishermen”. They eat in the wild, sleep on the ground, with the untidy families, but they laugh to their hearts’ contact. Then he compared “I” with “you”, finding that “I am happier than you”. He compared the “fishermen” with “I”, finding that “they were happier than I am”. At last he described the free “fish”, it swims freely in the lake and even wears nothing. Pound wrote four aspects: the “fishermen”, “I”, “you” and the “fish”. He made a structured comparison of each of the four aspects to challenge those self-appointed writers, and pointed out that the modern poets’ mind should be free roaming like the fish in the water. They should get rid of the old stereotypes of poetry and create poems freely.
Ezra Pound addresses the old-time question of happiness in privileged and underprivileged classes. The “generation of thoroughly smug” refers to middle and upper classes of society who, by conventional means, are uptight, dull, and “smug”, and in Pound's definition are “thoroughly uncomfortable”, with life. Pound parallels the “thoroughly smug” with the “fishermen”. The poem is about perseverance. “Fishermen” are poor, often uneducated, country folk. Pound parallels “fishermen” with struggling poets; both sects trying to survive by their individual means.
3.1.2 Image superposition
Image superposition is to superimpose images with the same meaning, and uses modify, qualifier, metaphor to constitute the relationship between images. Ezra Pound widely used this writing technique. The example is the poem “A Girl” which Pound wrote for his early lover:
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast -
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
------by Ezra Pound “A Girl”
In this poem, Pound first uses the image “tree” to superimpose and modify “I”, and then uses the image “moss” and “violet” to superposition and modify “tree”. It is clear that the image of the “tree” is a symbol of love and young girl. Pound first described the close relationship between “tree” and “I”. Then he added three images –”moss”, “violet” and “child” to praise the beauty of young girl. The girl is as young and beautiful as violet and moss. And she is also like green trees which full of life. All of these things moisten “my” growth of life, even though they are ungrounded yawp in most people’s eyes. In this superimposed image, we can find that the beauty of the young girl likes violet, and the vital force likes the tree and mo
ss.
We can see that those words or images have similar meaning, and their meanings have connected relationship. It is clearly that Pound used modify, qualifier, metaphor to constitute the relationship between images. So this poem uses typical image superposition.
3.1.3 Image juxtaposition
Image juxtaposition is quite similar to Image superposition, but actually they are different. Image juxtaposition is to appose two visible images together which from different time and space, to inspire and arouse the feelings of others. Hume said: “The imagery shows that the combination of the two visible images can be called a visual chord. Their combination gives people an image which is different from either of the two images.” The emotional feeling aroused by juxtaposition of different images has gone beyond the meanings of a particular image, but with an entirely new feel.
Pound said, “Image juxtaposition” can not allow any contact, whether it is an analogy or a synonym. The purpose of this technique is to “cut the lock of association of ideas”, so that the author can make the interaction relationship between images. The reader must take the initiative to use their imagination to explore the relationship between the two. Pound has always been emphasized on “Objective Present”. It is one of the effects of image juxtaposition, which means let the readers to understand the experience in poetry on their own, realize the “Similarity” between images, and get a sudden, new, near-epiphany of understanding.
Juxtaposition is like the Montage practice in the field of poetry. It is also the core writing technique used in Pound’s great work “The Cantos”.
Montage practice is a cinematic technique wildly used in modern film industry. It is a rapid succession of different images or shots in a movie. It composes pictures by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs. So we can regard it as the art or process of making such a single pictorial composition.
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral to its content.
The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Here I cite a few lines of chapter forty-ninth of poem “Cantos” as follows:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.
-----by Ezra Pound “Cantos”
In this poem, Pound used the melodic appearance of images to achieve an effect that common texts were not readily to gain. When we are reading these few lines, there will be subconscious images come into our mind, just as the words showed. The images change from “rain” to “empty river”, from “frozen cloud” to “heavy rain, from “the cabin roof” to “one lantern”. It is just like a rapid succession of different images or shots in a movie.
We can find that those words or images have different meaning, from different time and space, but they have connected relationship. It is clearly that Pound put those visible images together and achieved an admirable effect to inspire and arouse our feelings. This poem gets a responsive chord in the hearts of its readers.These melodic appearances of images are achieved by juxtaposing or superimposing different images. In other word, this effect is achieved by image juxtaposition or Montage practice.
3.2 Concise Language
Imagist poetry is famous for using concise language, without adjectives, qualifier, decorative “lace” and flaunting words. It writes short lines, with imagery. In the three principles of Imagism made by F. S. Flint, the second principle is “To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.” In an essay “A Few Don’ts by An Imagist”, Ezra Pound wrote three “Don’ts” as the principle of image poetry. The first “Don’t” is “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.”
Pound strictly obeys these principles. Here we take the landmark work of Pound's Imagist Poetry “In a Station of the Metro” for example:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
-----by Ezra Pound
“In a Station of the Metro”
This poem was first published in 1913 and is considered one of the leading poems of the Imagist tradition. Written in a Japanese haiku style, Pound’s process of deletion from thirty lines to only fourteen words typifies Imagism’s focus on economy of language, precision of imagery and experimenting with non-traditional verse forms. The poem is Pound’s written equivalent for the moment of revelation and intense emotion he felt at the Metro at La Concorde, Paris. Pound explains in his article value.
The poem is essentially a set of images that have unexpected likeness and convey the rare emotion that Pound was experiencing at that time. Arguably the heart of the poem is not the first line, nor the second, but the mental process that links the two together. “In a poem of this sort,” as Pound explained, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”[9]3 This darting takes place between the first and second lines. The pivotal semi-colon has stirred debate as to whether the first line is in fact subordinate to the second or both lines are of equal, independent importance.
Pound contrasts the factual, mundane image that he actually witnessed with a metaphor from nature and thus infuses this “apparition” with visual beauty. There is a quick transition from the statement of the first line to the second line’s vivid metaphor; this ‘super-position’ technique exemplifies the Japanese haiku style. The word “apparition” is considered crucial as it evokes a mystical and supernatural sense of imprecision which is then reinforced by the metaphor of the second line. The plosive word ‘Petals’ conjures ideas of delicate, feminine beauty which contrasts with the bleakness of the ‘wet, black bough’. What the poem signifies is questionable; many critics argue that it deliberately transcends traditional form and therefore its meaning is solely found in its technique as opposed to in its content. However when Pound had the inspiration to write this poem few of these considerations came into view. He simply wished to translate his perception of beauty in the midst of ugliness into a single, perfect image in written form.
3.3 Musical Rhythm
Ezra Pound has a strong musical rhythm in his works, which is mainly embodied in three aspects: firstly, he thinks poetry language should be musical and pays attention to the internal poetic rhythm; secondly, he successfully adopted the fugue melody of western music, and used it in his masterpiece Cantos; moreover, he uses the dapper image poems to load the richest content and emotion to reach the highest level of musical poetry -- quiet voice.
Rhythm is an important factor to form the musical aesthetics of poetry. It gives us pleasure and beauty, and it can unify the individual, coordinate difference, turn lethargy to concentrate. Therefore, the rhythm itself is very charming, and musical rhythm is usually considered to be the core of musical poetry. In the On imagism, Ezra Pound defined poetry that “poetry is the compounds or organization of musical words.”[10]6 In Pound’s view, the so-called music is just rhythm. A poem cannot be called as a poem if without rhythm. In the aspect of poetry, Pound has inherited the free verse of Whitman poems, and made a meaningful attempt. He found a new charming melody in the traditional pentameter poem, and combined the music and expressive force into free verse. The rhythm and sound changes with the emotion in poems, that is, to maintain the true feelings of the poems and gives its beautiful melody. When reading Pound's poetry, we will realize that the beauty of rhythm in his poetry not only exists in the rhythm itself, but more important is in the performance of content.
Pound also believes that poetry do not only need rhythm, but also include: (1) beautiful rhythm. A good poem has a residual sound in the listener's ear, which sounds like organ. (2) Rhythm should contain some surprising elements. That is to say the rhythm should be of innovation. (3) Rhythm should reflect a certain emotion; give reader a shock of soul.
In addition to the repeated experiments of the rhythm of poetry, Pound also innovated the structure of poetry. He changed the way of composing music into poetry skills, in order to further enhance the melody and artistic appeal of poetry. In the “Cantos”—the literary masterpiece which represent the highest achievements of Pound's poetry, Pound used “fugue” structure in the creation of many chapters. Fugue is a common music form in Western music, which includes “theme”, “response”, “counter-subject”, and with several “episodes”. Usually, fugue adopts “counterpoint” to arrange “theme&
rdquo;, “response” and “counter-subject” into the music in turn, and achieve polyphonic structure. This structure can overcome the psychological feeling of dull monotonous.
4．Influence of Pound poetry
Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet who is most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his declare of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry-stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.”
Pound appreciated Chinese poetry very much and learned the use of image from it. What’s more, he summarized the key techniques and formed his own imagism theory. His imagism theory, poetry writing skills and translation of Chinese poems not only influenced innumerable British and American writers, but also affected the development of Chinese modern literature.
4.1 The impact on domestic literature
Ezra Pound’s achievements in poetry field or literature field were well recognized. Though he learned a lot of writing skills from Chinese poetry, he also had an important influence on the literature development in China, especially the development of image poetry. We can say the modern Chinese poetry is greatly influenced by Imagism.
Image is an important category with key significance in Chinese poem studying and also an important numeral factor in poetry creation. Poet’s creation inspiration and experience to the life are both condensed in image. Image is the special way to manifest itself for poetry to be distinguished from other literary styles. The ancient Chinese image poetry has a long history. It is featured by clarity, precision, economy of language and combination of images. The western image poem theory was partly derived from Chinese, but later it influenced modern Chinese Poetry.
The genesis stage of Chinese modern image poetry is in 1920s. The representative poets were Hu Shi, Wen Yiduo and Li Jinfa. Hu was well known as the primary advocate for the literary revolution of the era, a movement which aimed to replace scholarly classical Chinese in writing with the vernacular spoken language, and to cultivate and stimulate new forms of literature. “The English and American poetry of image group showed multi-aspects influence on Hu Shi’s poetry point and his vernacular and New Poetry Movement.”[11]119
The whole exploration of poetry image art in1920s, looking the image art of ancient poetry as the control of modern image construction, experiences a process of modern decay and birth of new poem image, that is being intertwined with image tradition of ancient poetry (new vernacular poem in the early period), breaking away from traditional image system (represented by Guo Moruo), close examination of returning to tradition (new metrical poem group represented by Wen Yiduo) and rebel against tradition (represented by Li Jinfa).
The development period of Chinese image poetry is between 1930s and 1940s. It was the historical evolution process of modern image art from genesis，development to maturity and its regularity and phased characteristics. During this period, most school’s image poetry held the point of view with the core of dimness, harmonious theory and artistic conception. The Beijing school’s image poetry theories were including agreement theory, art and temperament and interest theory, revealing and hidden theory, inspiration theory and image connecting theory. The July school’s image theory explaining the poetry point on the center of Ai Qing’s concrete and abstract sensualist, image imagination theory and image and graphic theory and Hu Feng’s experience image theory. The Nine Leaves school’s poetry study is expanded from such aspects as poem quality theory, rational theory, artistic conception, structuralism theory, sinking theory and condensing theory etc. And it represents the basic maturity of modern image poetry theory. The representative poets were Dai Wangshu, He Qifang, Bain Zhilin, Fei Min, Ai Qing.
Up to the present, there are many Chinese scholars studying Ezra Pound’s poetry. Some of them are from the view of the relationship between Ezra Pound and Chinese poetry. Some others research from the perspective of translation to examine the translation skills the translation of Chinese poetry. The most of them use the perspective of traditional rhetorical method, and study images of poetry from perspective of the arts means and effects of literature. The study includes the role of poetic imagery, rhetorical skills, rhetorical effect and its artistic features and so on.
4.2 The impact on foreign literature
American poet, critic, and translator Ezra Pound was
an extremely important influence in the shaping of 20th-century poetry. He was one of the most famous and controversial literary figures of the century. No other twentieth century literary figure engaged as much with China as Pound. T. S. Eliot described him as the “inventor of Chinese poetry”.
Though the movement of Imagism only lasted for a short period of time, it is the beginning of New Poetry Movement in the United States. Its experiment on using “image” and free verse poetry changed many American readers’ tastes, and affected the process of American modern poetry. Pound's modernist experiments of the 1910s and 1920s have served as a counterforce to the established traditions of the “American Sublime” and the Anglo-American formalism represented by T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism. Beach, Christopher wrote a complete book length critical study ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. “ In this first full-length study of Pound's influence on American poetry after World War II, Beach argues that Pound's experimental mode created a new tradition of poetic writing in America. Often neglected by academic critics and excluded from the “canon” of American poetic writing, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and later members of this experimental tradition have maintained the sense of an American avant-garde in keeping with Pound's modernist experiments of the 1910s and 1920s.”[12]87
After the movement of Imagism, there is still a small number of poets, consciously or unconsciously adhered to some of the certain principles of Imagism, and expand the results of Imagism. William C. Williams’ performance is regarded as the most outstanding in this field. Under the guidance of Ezra Pound, he began his business on the road of studying Imagism. Then he combined the writing skills of Imagism with the subject matters and language style of the United States, and created a kind of “direct” Poetry. This kind of Poetry had a dramatic impact on the revolution of United States poetry during the 1950 to 1960.
T. S. Eliot and Irish writers W. B. Yeats were deepest influenced by Pound. T. S. Eliot was a poet, playwright and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings, the Waste Land has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses. Pound made detailed editorial comments and significant cuts to the manuscript. W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. Under Pound’s influence Yeats learned Pound's unauthorized alterations and got know of Chinese and Japanese poetry, which affected his later works.
5．Conclusion
The above discussion of Ezra Pound’s image poetry is by no means comprehensive but it can give us a clear point of view of Pound’s writing techniques and features. He successfully combined the features of Western poetry and Eastern poetry, and invited a new poetry theory. His way of combine images, use concise language and pay attention to rhythm are good skills which we can learn and use in poetry writing. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the language characteristics of Pound’s poetry and analysis his imagist poetry style, so as to provide some theoretical ideals from the view of reading, understanding and appreciate modern English poetry, thus making it easier for Chinese readers to appreciate English poetry.
Acknowledgements
My initial thanks to my supervisor Han Xiaoya, without her patient guidance and strict supervision, this paper would not have been written. Her suggestions help me a lot in the writing of this thesis. And her enlightening ideas will greatly influence studies in my academic life.
I am also very grateful to my roommates who have not only offered me their warm encouragements but also shared with me their valuable materials and suggestions on my writing of this thesis. Their kindness cannot be overstated.
I am further indebted to other teachers who have taught me and helped me in the past four years
In addition, any errors and inadequacies in this thesis are my sole responsibility.
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