In a Station of the Cantos: Ezra Pound’s ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto and the Shō-Shō Hakkei Tekagami

Abstract

The literary reputation of the modernist American poet Ezra Pound is founded upon his technical innovation and experimentation, as well as his receptiveness to a wide variety of cultural traditions. His poetry draws on the classical and medieval traditions of Europe, weaving together a complex response to the visual arts, sculpture, music, theology, and poetry from a wide range of linguistic sources. Pound was alert to important intellectual and artistic currents in history, especially those that he saw as unfairly marginalised despite their conceptual intensity – such as the Neoplatonic theology of the ninth-century Irish scholar Johannes Scottus Eriugena, or the poetry of the Troubadours in twelfth-century Provence. This intellectual and aesthetic ambition drew Pound to another set of traditions – the art and literature of Japan and China. The cultural heritage of East Asia had achieved a level of popular currency in the West in the nineteenth century, particularly in France and the United States, but only began to receive comprehensive scholarly attention in the early years of the twentieth century. Pound’s crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the West, especially in his translations of Chinese poetry, has long been recognised – T. S. Eliot wrote as early as 1928 that Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." More recently, scholars have been careful to qualify Pound’s youthful orientalism, and rightly show caution regarding his more strident claims for and uses of Chinese materials, particularly as Pound’s materials were often mediated by such other languages and scholarly traditions as French and Japanese.