Ezra Pound, Chinese culture and the variation theory

Ezra Pound emerged as a distinctive poet and proponent of literary movements in the early 20th century, particularly Imagism. Pound drew inspiration from Chinese characters and poetry, which he used as cultural sources to shape his proposed poetics. This paper applies the variation theory, the most recent theory of the Chinese school of comparative literature, to re-examine cultural migration by evaluating Pound's invention of Chinese poetry in English. The paper shows that Pound's Chinese cultural sources consisted of the pictoriality of ideograms, the juxtaposition of images, and the rhyme of Chinese poetry. He transformed these sources into his poetics, which comprised the ideogrammic method, the severance of grammar, the quest for poetic musicality, and the absence of subject in English verse, where the subject of the sentence is often omitted to create a more concise and imagistic writing style. The paper argues that Pound's Imagism is an exemplary instance of iconic variation, successfully creating a Chinese poetic essence in English poetry. Despite some misunderstandings about Chinese culture, it has produced significant new aesthetic trends, encouraged linguistic renewal, and conveyed numerous elements of Chinese culture in English poetry.