| Scope and method of study. The Pisan Cantos, the magnum opus of Ezra Pound, exhibits numerous idiosyncratic characteristics. For example, Pound invariably "pictographs" the Chinese ideograms in the English text through his careful use of line breaks. In effect, the visual rendition of the English text mirrors the contour of the Chinese ideograms standing next to it. To understand what Pound carefully does here, one must examine the paideuma of Western art at the dawn of Twentieth Century when the fundamental aesthetics of Western culture broke apart due to the rapid changes brought by the dynamism of the modern machine age. Modern visual arts (Cubism, in particular) were the first to react against "the bitch (the European tradition) gone in the teeth." Following such an iconoclastic impulse in visual art, almost all Modernists across the board attempted to emulate the new aesthetics. To prove these "inter-artistic" influences, I examine two Modernists' works: Stein's novel Three Lives and Williams' poem "The Red Wheelbarrow." Eventually, Pound's introduction of the Chinese ideograms to Modernism turned out to be congenial and propitious in such an "inter-artistic" environment.; Findings and conclusions. Pound's seemingly odd line breaks in his Pisan Cantos are a culmination of all these aesthetic changes brought about by the paradigmatic shift at the dawn of Twentieth Century. Pound's poetic medium in the sequence is, therefore, a unique "Gorilla Language" that is hard, precise, concrete, and memorable. He succeeds in creating an ideogram-like poetic medium with the English text: a verbum perfectum. Pound crystalizes the English text into a poetic medium that freezes the progress of time, a task heretofore thought impossible in temporal art of poetry. |
