China and the West

Rexroth, Kenneth ; Snyder, Gary. Chinese poetry and the American imagination. [Statements from a symposium, April 1977]. In : Ironwood ; no 17 (1981).
Kenneth Rexroth:
Chinese poetry began to influence writers in English with the translations into French of Hervey St. Denis and others in the mid-19th century who translated Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang into French free verse. If American and English poets did not read French, the translations of Herbert Giles and other Sinologists like him were practically worthless, because of the doggerel verse in which they were rendered. Probably the most influential was Judith Gautier's Le livre de Jade, which was translated by E. Powys Mathers in Colored Stars and A Garden of Bright Waters. Neither Gautier nor Mathers read Chinese and, in fact, her informant was a Thai who didn't read Chinese either. Nevertheless, these prose poems (which first appeared in Stuart Merrill's Pastels in Prose) came across as deeply moving poetry in English.
Approximately contemporarily appeared the first translations by Arthur Waley and, not long after, Ezra Pounds Cathay. Pound and Waley taught the West a kind of irregular iambic pentameter or free verse, in both cases as dependent on quantitative rhythms as on accentual. Chinese poetry, in fact, bears no resemblance to this kind of verse. It is rhymed with considerable emphasis, usually, on the rhymed words, and at first was in four monosyllable lines, or five, or seven, and in addition the tones which distinguished the mean-ings of homonymous Chinese monosyllables came to follow regular patterns. Later in the T'ang, and reaching its flower in the Sung Dynasty, poems were patterned on the irregular lines of songs, as well as being written in the five or seven syllable classic patterns.
Learned and industrious people have tried to reproduce in English the original rhythms, but have managed to produce only absurdities. So Chinese poetry has come to influence the West as a special form of Chinese verse— which annoys some more pedantic Sinologists of Chinese ancestry. It is a special kind of free verse and its appearance happened to converge with the movement toward Objectivism, Imagism, and even the Cubist poetry of Gertrude Stein and Pierre Reverdy—"no ideas but in things", as Williams says rather naively.
There is almost no rhetorical verse of the kind we find in Augustan Latin and later in Renaissance poetry throughout Europe, nor is there the luxuriously foliate poetry of India (with the possible exception of the Li Sao). There are no true poetic epics in Chinese poetry. The heroic epic of China is an historical novel, The Romance of Three Kingdoms. And, until recent years, the verse of Chinese drama was considered beneath serious literary consideration, although, for instance, "The Flower Burying Song" from the play taken from The Dream of the Red Chamber is quite impressive poetry. There are verse treatises in Chinese comparable to Virgil's Georgies or Horace's Art of Poetry, but even they follow the tendency toward direct presentation of concrete images.
Most Chinese poetry, whether elegiac or love poetry, situates die reader in a definite 'mise-en-scene'. "The driving wind and rain tear the banana leaves" we are in the South. "The swallows huddle in their nest under the gilded rafters"—a palace. "I am too weary to pick up my jade inlaid lute"—probably a concubine. "Soon the wild geese will be returning from the North, but they will bring me no message"—he is away fighting the Northern Barbarians. This can become a facile formula, especially when, in the later dynasties, the lines were arranged in strictly parallel couplets, but it is certainly a way to produce effective—affective—poetry, if you are a poet. In fact, it differs little from the poetry envisaged by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads and often realized in their best poems. But so true is it also of Horace's "Under Soracte" or the best poems of Hafiz or the rare poignant imagistic moments in Tennyson's "In Memoriam".
Chinese poetry entered the American and, to a much lesser degree, English poetic consciousness at exactly the right moment to purge the rhetoric and moralizing of 19th century Romantic poetry and the even more moralistic, preachy poetry of the '90s. Much of the poetry of Ernest Dowson is little sermons of disappointed Epicureanism.
Japanese poetry, which after all is an extremely compressed expression of Chinese aesthetics, became popular among American poets at about the same time and through the same people—Pound, Waley, and Mathers. Today, for a very large sector of American poets, the poetry of the Far East is more influential than 19th and 20th century French poetry, which has dominated the international idiom for so long, and certainly incomparably more influential than American or English poetry of the 19th century. The only rival is the slowly dying influence of "metaphysical" verse of the English Renaissance. It would be possible to name over a hundred American poets deeply influenced by the poetry of the Far East and some who have difficulty in thinking about poetry in any other idiom than Chinese or Japanese. Now, of course, there are a number of poets, by no means uninfluential, who read Chinese and Japanese and who are philosophically Buddhist or Taoist or both.

Gary Snyder
The fact is that although first and foremost the translations of Ezra Pound Arthur Waley, a little later Witter Bynner, have had a distinctive impact 01 people's thinking and people's poetics, there was another thing that has been very important, running parallel to that right through, and that has been the idea of the Chinese poet, the image that the Chinese poet as a poet, as role model, presented to us.
In a simple way, I think, our first Anglo-American received view of the Chinese poets was that they were civil servants. And in a simplified way, then is some truth in this. There were extremes as great perhaps as Han Yu on the one side as a rigorous, benevolent, socially-minded poet, Confucianist all his life; and at the other end, perhaps a poet like Han Shan, who speaks entirely from the hermit's habitat. Yet in actual fact, these two kinds of poetry, which am artificially separating for the moment, were generally produced by the same people. Now to add to the complexity, we have no real models in Occidental poetry of poets who either were staunch, quiet, solid civil servants involved in responsible positions in society for a whole lifetime as a regular type of poet nor do we have on the other hand a real tradition of hermit's poetry in the Occident. So it's all the more interesting to see that these two types of roles o poetry were both in China coming from the same individuals, often at differ¬ent stages within one lifetime, or in some cases, it was just a matter of literally changing hats—Confucian hat to Taoist hat while on a trip to the country.
I first responded, in 1949, living in Oregon, to my contact with Chinese poetry on the level of nature; that was what I was interested in. As a student of anthropology beginning to read on Far Eastern matters but really focusing or American Indian studies, I was deeply concerned with the almost abstract questions of philosophy of nature and problems involved when high civilizations impact on nature and impact on natural peoples. As a mountaineer and backpacker, when I read Chinese poetry, I was struck in some of the translations by qualities hard to describe . . . clarity, limpidity, space, and at the same time, a fine, specialized and precise attention and observation of natural detail—natural detail existing and functioning within a very large, 10,000 li, moonlit territory. That was my first interest in it.
Later, of course, reading more widely, and still only in translations, I realized that the extent was quite a bit broader, that it went from the Shih Ching (known variously as The Book of Odes, The Book of Songs, and The Confucian Odes) to, say, Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Shih Ching to Mao Tse-tung, and that it included a vast range of possibilities of content. I also see now how different American poets came to Chinese poetry and received different things. As I
looked initially only to the hermit poet/nature poet for inspiration and for a while took that to be what Chinese poetry really was, so a man whose work I valued highly as a teacher in poetic technology, namely Ezra Pound, found in Chinese poetry something else entirely. Pound was delighted with the possibility of poets having political power in a strong bureaucracy. Those perhaps are the two extremes—myself or someone like myself, and Pound or someone like Pound—in their reactions to the role possibilities implied in Chinese poetry.
Then we begin to notice something else there, lurking slightly below the surface, slightly further back in time—we see a glimmering in Li Ho, it's there very clearly in the Ch'-u T'zu (The Songs of the South), and we can discern it in certain features in the Shih Ching—and that is the poet as shaman. The shaman-poet role has been explicated for us by Edward Schafer's recent work, The Divine Woman, that brings out a whole range of images and symbols and underlying energies that are in that poetry, that you might not see there at first glance.
And yet, to go one more step, finally, for myself, what I go back to Chinese poetry for is its humaneness. I'm going to go back for a second to the introduction to the Shih Ching (compiled circa 600 B.C.), the original classic collection/anthology. "Poetry is to regulate the married couple, establish the principle of filial piety, intensify human relationships, elevate civilization, and improve public morals ". That's Confucius' estimate, or somebody like Confucius, of what poetry should do; and it must have had great influence because that man was highly respected in later centuries. Thinking this one through again, I thought: well, there's a lot of truth in what he says, and actually poetry in a healthy, stable society (in which poets are not forced willy-nilly to all be alienated revolutionaries) does influence the behavior of lovers, and it does make one think of one's parents, and put importance on friendship, and give meaning to history and culture, and improve public manners. So then I thought, yes, poetry should do that. Actually, in a visionary way, what we want poetry to do is guide lovers toward ecstasy, give witness to the dignity of old people, intensify human bonds, elevate the community, and improve public spirit. And so, it is in just that humaneness, that delicate—I'm almost tempted to use the word sweet—appreciation of the details of human life, families, the frustrations of employment with the government, and the frustrations of being a hermit, that we perhaps respond to most deeply in Chinese poetry, having a poetry ourselves which is so different in a way, so mythological, so political and so elevated, that it can't deal with ordinary human affairs often.