In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. After studying Chinese poetry, Williams published his celebrated set of poems
The Cassia Tree.
Exposure to the Tao and its doctrines renewed Moore’s style. Qian presents a lost lecture by Moore on the subject, transcribed here for the first time. Pound was equally influenced by Confucianism and by, as Qian demonstrates, anthropological studies of the spiritualism and pictographic language of the little-known Naxi people of southwest China. Qian’s sinuous readings expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, obsession with imaginative sensibility, and enlarged respect for harmony between humanity and nature.