China and the West

Marianne Moore and China : general.
Quellen
Animals in paintings from Asia. Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1965).
Baynes. Vol. 1-2. (New York, N.Y. : Pantheon Books, 1950). (Bollingen series ; 19).
Bynner, Witter. Laotzu. The way of life according to Laotzu [ID D30328]. [With notations].
Candolle, Alphonse de. Origin of cultivated plants. (New York, N.Y. : D. Appleton, 1886).
Master bronzes : selected from museums and collections in America. February 1937.
Confucius. The analects of Confucius. Transl. and ann. by Arthur Waley [ID D8879]. [With notations].
Confucius. Shih-ching : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. [Transl. by] Ezra Pound. [ID D29062].
Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest. Transl. by Ezra Pound. [ID D29063]. [1951, With notations].
Confucius to Cummings : an anthology of poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound [ID D30334].
Costumes from the Forbidden City. Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 1945).
Cottrell, Annette B. Dragons. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1962).
Davis, Frank. The Chinese dragon. In : Illustrated London news ; Aug. 23 (1930).
Davis, Frank. The unnatural history of China : the lions of Buddha. In : Illustrated London news ; vol. 178 (1931).
Eaton, Evelyn. Go ask the river [ID D30339].
Encyclopedia Britannica.
European and Oriental sculpture. Anderson Galleries (Dec. 1928).
Exhibition of early Chinese paintings and sculptures. Bourgeois Gallery, New York (Nov.-Dec. 1922). [With notations].
Fang, Achilles. Rhymeprose on literature. In : Harvard journal of Asiatic studies (1951).
Franck, Harry Alverson. Roving through southern China [ID D3164].
Guang, Rusi. Chinese wit, wisdom and written characters [ID D30337].
Hackney, Louise Wallace. Guide-posts to Chinese painting. (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927).
Ji, Lu ; Hughes, E[rnest] R[ichard]. The art of letters : Lu Chi's "Wen fu", A.D. 302 [ID D30329].
Lin, Yutang. The Chinese theory of art [ID D30330].
The lost flute, and other Chinese lyrics [ID D30333].
Master bronzes. (Buffalo : Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 1937).
Paine, Robert Treat. Animals in paintings from Asia. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1956).
Pallister, Bury. The China collectors : Parker companion. (London : Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1874).
Pound, Ezra. Instigations of Ezra Pound ; together with an essay on the Chinese written character [ID D22141].
Reed, Stanley. Oriental rugs and carpets. (New York, N.Y. : Putnam, 1967).
The silent zero, in search of sound. Transl. by Erich Sackheim [ID D30336].
Sitwell, Osbert. Escape with me ! : an Oriental sketch book.[ID D3453].
Studies in Chinese literature. Ed. by John L. Bishop. [ID D10623].
Sze, Mai-mai. The tao of painting : a study of the ritual disposition of Chinese painting [ID D30310].
Sze, Mai-mai. The way of Chinese painting [ID D30335]. [Inscribed "For Marianne Moore this pocket version! Affectionately, Mai-mai Sze, November 24, 1959"].
Topsell, Edward. Historie of foure-footed beastes. (London : Printed by William Iaggard, 1607).
The treasure of Luhan. In : Metropolitan Museum of art bulletin. (Dec. 1919).
Wilhelm, Richard. The I ching : or, Book of changes. Rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Vol. 1-2. (New York, N.Y. : Pantheon Books, 1950). (Bollingen series ; 19).
Worcester Art Museum news bulletin and calendar. (1955). [Article on Chinese jades and photos of Zhou dynasty dragon].
Xue, Tao. I am a thought of you [ID D30338].

Sekundärliteratur
1971-1972
David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : Marianne Moore states in the epigraph to her Complete poems : "Omissions are not accidents". We can assume that she is reticent about what she does not know well and that she will only "talk about them when I understand them".
She never makes direct references to or gives quotations of classical Chinese poetry in her work. But we find in her poetry some allusions to Chinese objects d'art. She finds 'precision' and 'fastidiousness' in many things Chinese.
1995
Lina Unali : Marianne Moore searched in the Orient and in China in particular, for new sources of artistic inspiration and regeneration. Sometimes this only led to a rephrasing of traditional values in more agreeable terms.
1997
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/orient/mod10.htm.
Marianne Moore's interest in China stemmed in part from her friendship with a Presbyterian missionary family and her visits to New York galleries. Always intrigued by the exotic, she regularly sought elements of "the wisdom of the East" to illustrate her moral points.
1999
Cynthia Stamy : As a young adult, Moore was experiencing the East as strange and peculiar. China's unfettered ability to resist American religious assimilation, the Christian framework which was so important for the Moore family, must have made it seem seven more alien, and possibly more exotic. Her affinity for scholarly work on Chinese subjects from poetry to painting, calligraphy, chinoiserie, textile design, and religious history is evident not only in her poetry and appended notes, but also in prose work throughout her writing career. Moore was involved in the imaginative production of the Orient ; she posited China as a repository of wisdom, forbearance, peace, and tranquility. At different times, Moore uses Chinese poetry, art, and philosophy to resist the dictates of contemporary verse forms, the influence of European literature and art, the restrictions of a masculine logic, and the imposition of the demands of contemporary politics and mass culture. Moore's fascination with dragons of the Far East can be seen as symptomatic of her apparent need to invest China and things Chinese with an originary potency, to place moral statements against a ground of the ancient and even prehistoric. Moore practices a kind of poetic primitivism in her poems that include Chinese supernatural creatures which allies her work with that of modernist painters who engaged in a similar practice of juxtaposition. Moore's deployment of things Chinese in her poems is augmented by her respect for Chinese ingenuity and tradition. Her selectivity in choosing China's art, but not her history, China's imperial past, but not her peasantry, is itself a dated orientalist response which reflects an impression of China suited to her own needs.
Moore's original use of the Chinese 'fu' style of poetry is one successful instance of her consisten ingenuity in finding and employing 'new' form in her poetry. While Moore was not the first modern poet to prefer a Far Eastern form for expressing feelings and truths found in observations of nature, she used the model of the Chinese 'fu' in distinctive ways. The self-conscious antiquarianism of her repeated borrowing of 'fu' techniques exposes Moore's sens of the problematic nature of modernity, as she employed this ancient formal tributary model to pose questions about the moral and cultural significance of the present. Moore's 'fu'-inspired poems exhibit the kind of authority and didacticism which often characterize an ancient poetry. Like the Imagists and the practioners of the 'fu', Moore in her poetry exhibits a sustained use of a form of free verse within a very exacting structure. Her use of syllabic verse does not create its own rhythm and, therefore, the reader's attention is called to prose rhythms within the poem. The influences Moore seems to have absorbed from the 'fu', both in terms of structure and subject-matter, are distributed widely throughout her work and can be found in poems written both early and late in her career. Her interrelationships between the human and the natural were central to both the Confucian and Taoist traditions philosophies which Moore studied and referred to in her prose and poetry. Moore's syllabic verse also forms link with the Chinese language, in which each character is a single syllable.
Moore's familiarity with Chinese scrolls was such that she was capable of making references to a specific type of scroll which depicted characteristic scenes of the larger rivers in China.
2003
Qian Zhaoming : Marianne Moore showed a passion for the artifacts of late imperial China – the Yuan, Ming, and Qing products – throughout her long career. Moore is fond of going to Chinese art exhibitions primarily because they promise to educate her eyes. As her correspondence reveals, she takes delight not only in examining the exhibits but also in recounting her prized items. Moore's interest in Chinese art is primarily an interest in Chinese animal pictures illustrating an approach that might be called 'imaginative objectivism'. By studying Chinese animal pictures, Moore benefits more than just recapturing some images in her own poetry. The true value for Moore of the Chinese tradition of treating animals is that it braces up her objection to the Western bias of the animal genre. She had attended many Chinese art shows where she has the freedom of examining for herself how Chinese painters turn themselves into 'instruments' of actual life.
The Tao of painting by Mai-mai Sze awakened Moore to its true meaning and possibilities. It encouraged her to rethink the value of her own ambiguity and reserve in some early experiments. From Sze she has learned to overlook the distinction between Confucianism and Daoism / Buddhism.
2006
Victoria Bazin : Marianne Moore deploys imagery and tropes in circulation in the newspapers and literature she was reading on the subject of China and Chinese art and culture. Moore's respect for Eastern difference might appear to be an enlightened attempt to refuse the Orientalist impulse to accumulate knowledge of the 'other' thereby reinforcing Western hegemonic power, the fact that her poetic observations of 'China' reproduce it as a site of exotic and unfathomable otherness suggests its general complicity with European exoticism.