This is a brief comparative look at Chinese, Japanese, and American Modernist Poetry in order to demonstrate the influence of China and Japan on Modernism, specifically William Carlos William’s Spring and All and Ezra Pound’s “In A Station of the Metro.” We’ll look at the influence of Chan/Zen Buddhist thought, a Chinese Poet named Wang Wei and some of Spring and all “And In a station of the Metro” in relation to the Japanese poetic theory of Haiku.
According to Chan Buddhist philosophy, “a devout Buddhist… d[oes] not view nature from an outside perspective; rather, he [is] himself a part of nature” (Wang Wei and Saigyo 45). It emphasizes the “equality among all living things.” The same philosophy is reflected in Robinson Jeffer’s transhumanism (Wang Wei and Saigyo 45). In Chinese poetry this is applied stylistically by the merging of the self, the speaker, with the scene depicted in the poem. The term shunya, meaning “void,” is applied (Murray 11). The concept is described first in the visual art of painting, as was the case with the Modernist writer’s fascination with Cubist art. The analogy between painting and poetry is as follows: “as space is to substance, so is silence to speech” (Murray 12). The principle is demonstrated and expressed more elaborately by Ernest Hemingway: “Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing” (Murray 12). His iceberg theory of writing prose has Chan Buddhist resonances. Writing becomes a “wrestling with inarticulacy, with the void” (Murray 13). As the “way of the warrior [requires]…“fearlessness in the face of death” so the way of the poet requires a fearlessness of the ineffable, the indescribable (Murray 14). It becomes a representation of that great poetic debate of whether or not language can truly represent reality. According to Chan/Zen Buddhism, reality is a delusion. So what harm could there be in trying?
Wang Wei was a poet during China’s Tang Dynasty during the eighth century. A civil servant as well as poet, he “reportedly attempted suicide when he was imprisoned during the An Lu-shan Rebellion, and only a poem written to his friend Pei Di from Bodhi Temple saved him from being charged as a collaborator during the aftermath of the rebellion” (Wang Wei and Saigyo 45). What makes his poetry especially interesting is that he is “a devout Buddhist with a notable Taoist influence” (Wang Wei and Saigyo 45). The concept of Wu Wei is especially important to Taoist thinking. It loosely means “effortless action.” It is spontaneous action free from contrivance. The act of poetry can be a reflection of this principle as well. In his poem “You Asked About My Life. I Send You, Pei Di, these lines,” Wang Wei relies on the Buddhist image of the “white cloud,” which in the Chinese poetics traditionally represents “barriers between the poet and Nirvana” (Wang Wei and Saigyo 46). The image is also a test. To see the cloud as it is can be equally as challenging as seeing the cloud as something representative of something else. Either way, the poetry is meant to be “effortless and selfless” (Wang Wei and Saigyo 45). At the very least it must appear that way. It should reflect Wu Wei.
How does this pertain to Modern Poetry?
William Carlos William’s Spring and All utilizes “a fusion of prose and poetry” (Zhaoming 144). This fused style has its precedent in a Chinese poet named Tao Quian who lived during the fourth century. The mixed genre style was known as “fu” (Zhaoming 144). Not only does Williams follow the style, he has a notable Chan Buddhist influence in his prose:
“Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself – sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity” (Spring and All 69).
This “Intelligence” could be understood as the Chan Buddhist understanding of the Inner-Buddha Nature of every individual. It is something within every person individually and is therefore outside of us collectively. This principle appear in the poetics of the Japanese Haiku as well: “The concrete image that is captured in time is being zoomed out of its temporal existence and cast into an image frozen in timelessness” (Grabher 9). By being of an instant the image is simultaneously timeless. It is a paradox inherent to a monistic worldview like belonging to the Buddhism of China and Japan. In Wallace Stevens’ words, the “final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else” (from Adagia quoted in Ramazani’s anthology 236). There is an idealism in Modernism and the poetry of China and Japan. Modernism was founded upon similar principles, not simply because one directly imitated the other but because there was a sympathetic resonance between poets distanced from one another by time and space. Pound’s “direct treatment of a thing” echoes Basho’s instruction “not [to] let a hair’s breadth separate your self from the subject” (Grabher 7, ibid).
Works Cited Page
Grabher, Gudrun M. “In Search of Words for ‘Moon-Viewing’: The Japanese Haiku and the Skepticism towards Language in Modernist American Poetry.” Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry. Patea, Viorica and Paul Scott Derrick. Amersterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007. 135-159. Print.
Hamill, Sam. “On The Making of Ezra Pound’s Cathay.” The American Poetry Review 16.4 (1987): 44-46. Web. 30 March 2014.
Hamill, Sam. “Wang Wei and Saigyo: Two Buddhist Mountain Poets.” The American Poetry Review, 22.2 (1993): 45-50 Web. 30 March 2014.
Murray, Ciaran. “Some Versions of Nothing” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 14.1 (2008): 9-20. Web. 30 March 2014.
Willis, Patricia C. “Petals On A Wet Black Bough: American Modernism and the Orient.” The Yale University Library Gazette. 71.1/2 (1996): 61-71. Web. 30 March 2014.
Zhaoming, Qian. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Print.
Wow–this proposal is truly one-of-a-kind. I wonder if casting it as a dialogue might overly complicate what is already a highly complicated idea. I’m not aware of much work being done on Williams and certain Eastern religious traditions, though they might find there way into his work via other avenues. Eliot does work within a Christian worldview, but he actually introduces Eastern religious traditional very intentionally in TWL. In that sense, you might focus more on how each author explicitly or implicitly harnesses certain Eastern ideas / ideals in their respective epoch-making poems.
Yours is a project that seems more suited to a traditional researched analysis (rather than a socratic dialogue). You can try to convince me otherwise, of course. For Friday, whatever the end result will be, please begin building a bibliography of secondary sources on eastern religious ideas and American literature (and modernism in particular, and Eliot and Williams even more particularly).
Good luck!