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The Second Tide: Chinese Influence on American Poetry Today

The first tide of interest in Chinese classical poetry came upon modem American poetry at its very inception—the American Poetry Renaissance—when American poets unexpectedly “discovered” the treasure of Chinese poetry, and found that their own movement was an American reincarnation of the Chinese spirit. Indeed we can hardly find a major poet at the time untouched by this “spiritual invasion from China.”1 The tide reached its peak in 1922, and then gradually subsided. From that time on till 1950s, the conservative Eliot-New Criticism dominance was so oppressively stable that interest in Chinese poetry was confined to a few individual poets. It was only after the late 1950s when the storm of the Beat Generation and other antiacademic poetry movements swept the American poetry scene that the tide of interest in Chinese poetry rose the second time. Unlike the first one, the second tide has been less sensational but more enduring. Today, after almost three decades, there is no sign of the ebbing. The contemporary Open Verse trend has Ezra Pound as its godfather, and William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth as its two patrons on the two coasts. It is by no means coincidental that all the three were enthusiastic about Chinese poetry. Here, perhaps, I have to say a few words about Williams, relationship to Chinese poetry, since the enthusiasm of the other two for Chinese poetry is already well documented. Indeed Williams insistently refused to acknowledge any foreign influence, for he wanted to emphasize his credo of the “American idioms.” Not until his last years did he reveal his interest in Chinese poetry, his surprisingly passionate praise in his review of Rexroth’s translation of One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1956) as “poetry in true American idioms,” and his own translations of Chinese poetry2 as well, attested to it. Had this long-hidden interest anything to do with his old friend and old enemy Ezra Pound? He quarreled with Pound over the latter’s cosmopolitanism which, he thought, was not compatible with his “Americanism”, So when I found in his translation a deliberately mistranslated line, I could not help but smile: the last line of Li Yi’s famous poem should be “It tasted so different at heart.” Williams, however, made it into four lines: © Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd 2020 Y. Zhao, The River Fans Out, China Academic Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7724-6_10

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10 The Second Tide: Chinese Influence on American Poetry Today Involute, Entangled, The feeling of departure Clings like a wet leaf to my heart.

This is too clear an echo of Ezra Pound’s poem “Liu Che”: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

This celebrated clinging leaf of Pound’s had been resurrected in many American poems, especially around 1920.3 Since Williams’ version is not a translation at all (while the rest of his group of Chinese poems are fairly faithfully translated), we can only see this as a unadmitted tribute to Ez