Exploring The Origins Of Ezra Pound’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Poetics

Ezra Pound was a great poet, famous translator and critic in American modern literature. He initiated Imagism, which symbolized the beginning of English and American modern poetry, and infused new vigor to the then lifeless and flagging poetic circles. Hence, he created new and unique poetics with completely whole new ideas, which revolutionized English and American poetry.It was no exaggeration to say that the western modern poetics was Pound’s poetics. The three principles influenced the poetic creation of numerous modern poets. Rapid developments of economy and politics in the 20 th century motivated the mutual communication among different cultures. While western classical poetics attached more importance to rationalism, Chinese classical poetics paid more attention to emotions. Western modern poetics concerned mainly about the poetic theories which were put forward by western modern poets with Pound as a typical example. He not only found inspirations from Greek-Roman classical traditions and his ancestors, but also extended his vision to the further time and space and learned some non-mainstream cultures in order to get more resources which could be adopted into his own poetic creation. Chinese modern poetics came into being under the mutual influences of western poetics and Chinese classical poetics. Most Chinese modern poetry not only focused on the expression of emotions but also paid attention to the importance of reasoning.This thesis aims at exploring the origins of Pound’s poetry from the perspective of poetics. Pound’s poetic theories and ideas are mainly expressed in his early poetry and also in his masterpiece The Cantos. His works can mainly be divided into four phrases: early poetry, early Cantos, middle Cantos and late Cantos. This paper tries to figure out Pound’s poetics by analyzing his poetry in different phrases and then go deeper into exploring the origins of his poetics. The thesis can be mainly divided into six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction of the life and major works of Ezra Pound. Chapter two is an overview of Western and Chinese classical poetics and a generalization of modern developments of poetics. Chapter three mainly introduces Ezra Pound’s poetics as a typical example of modern poetics. Chapter four is the analysis of Ezra Pound’s poetry which can be divided into four parts: early poetry, early Cantos, middle Cantos and late Cantos. Chapter five attempts a further exploration of the poetic origins of Pound’s poetry in different periods. Chapter six concludes that Pound learns a lot from Chinese classical poetics and Japanese Haiku in his early poetry and in his Cantos, and his poetic ideas not only come from western traditions, but also Chinese Confucianism and Japanese Noh Play. We can see that Pound not only gets inspirations from Greek-Roman classical traditions but also absorbs the essence of eastern culture especially Chinese and Japanese culture which makes more westerners know the East better and Pound contributes a lot to the progress of “spreading the eastern culture to the West”.