Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Zhaoming Qian

Pound's failure to reproduce Wang Wei's whole art, however, has been potent, generative, ironically influential. First, he was exposed to a poetics firmly based on the non-dualistic notions of Taoism/Zen-Buddhist. Though Pound may not have been able to grasp Wang Wei's Taoist/Zen-Buddhist philosophy, he was by that point both intuitively and conceptually conditioned to appreciate the T'ang poet's Taoist/Zen-Buddhist art. In Yu's description, this art perfected in Wang Wei's hand is characterized by "its concentrated vision and form; its precise yet evocative imagery; its preference for the concise and concrete as opposed to the discursive and abstract; its mode of presentation which places as much value, if not more, on what is implied as on what is stated directly" (Reading 187). Apparently these traits corresponded precisely to Pound's imagist/vorticist doctrine. By imitating Wang Wei he crystallized a critical insight that enabled him to expand subject and method.

Furthermore, Pound's encounter with Wang Wei began at the moment when he was composing and recomposing Ur-Cantos 1-3 ("Three Cantos"), and it continued through the years in which he became increasingly disenchanted with the uncertain manner with which he opened his modern epic. Ronald Bush has examined the influence of James, de Gourmont, Laforgue, Eliot, and Joyce on Pound's refashioned style for the Ur-Cantos of 1917-1919. To these we must add the art of Wang Wei that contributed to the poetic breakthrough Pound made during this period. Bush is undoubtedly correct in emphasizing the dominant impact of de Gourmont, who directed Pound to unify his long poem's "rag-bag" of subject matter by "the inflections of a single sensibility" (159). However, it was through comparing him with Wang Wei ("His spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu") that Pound rediscovered de Gourmont's true value, and it was by drawing on Wang Wei's imagery ("The mist clings to the lacquer") that he found the most precise and the most vivid terms to redefine de Gourmont's sensibility. Moreover, in his attempt to imitate de Gourmont in the Ur-Cantos, Pound began by imitating Wang Wei, whose art he considered an equivalent of the French symbolist's. Thus, in Ur-canto 4 (now Canto 4), which marks Pound's turning away "from the uncertain Browningesque pastiche of Three Cantos' to the creation of a modern style" (Froula 5), we notice that the force which holds together his "rag-bag" of subject matter is a sensibility borrowed from Wang Wei.

In the Gourmontian context provided by Bush we can see clearly that the "Smoke-peach-trees" passage of Canto 4 is intended "precisely to display the complex subjectivity of a mind" (202). As has been demonstrated previously, the sensory images of the passage are culled from two versions of Wang Wei's poems; "Peach Source Song" communicates a youthful yearning for T'ao Ch'ien's imaginary realm of the "Peach-blossom Fountain," where men live in abundance and in peace with nature and environment, and "Farm Field Pleasure" celebrates the tranquil life of a Taoist/ Zen-buddhist recluse. Pound has made no attempt to follow the original designs of Wang Wei's poems. (In fact, I believe that he was rather relying on reminiscence sustained from reworking versions of Wang Wei to compose these lines.) Yet, by conflating key elements - sensual images and a serene manner that unmistakably bear the T'ang poet's imprint - from the two lyrics, he has miraculously reproduced the single, deep, and unified emotion that is depicted in "Peach Source Song" and "Farm Field Pleasure."