Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The European Hallucination
- 2 Emerson and the Language of Nature
- 3 Character Assassination: Representing Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Linguistics
- 4 Otto Jespersen and Chinese as the Future of Language
- 5 Language in Its Primary Use: Fenollosa and the Chinese Character
- Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the Poetics of Creative Reading
- 6 Modernizing Orientalism/Orientalizing Modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese Translation, and English-as-Chinese
- 7 Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
7 - Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The European Hallucination
- 2 Emerson and the Language of Nature
- 3 Character Assassination: Representing Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Linguistics
- 4 Otto Jespersen and Chinese as the Future of Language
- 5 Language in Its Primary Use: Fenollosa and the Chinese Character
- Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the Poetics of Creative Reading
- 6 Modernizing Orientalism/Orientalizing Modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese Translation, and English-as-Chinese
- 7 Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
I grew up with the poetry of twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism. Ezra Pound introduced me to Chinese poetry, and I began to study classical Chinese. When it came to writing out of my own experience, most of modernism didn't fit, except for the steer toward Chinese and Japanese.
In a brief text directly reminiscent of the earth-beating song in Canto 49, Gary Snyder brings together several characteristic features of his work – directness, economy, clarity of expression – which he shares particularly with the Pound of the imagist manifesto and Cathay:
When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.
What most carries over from Pound's earth-beating song here, of course, is the short, sharply accentual line and the elemental quality of the language, which is closely related to the connection in the poem between natural events and human acts. Like the speaker of Pound's poem, the speaker here is the spokesperson for a community and a way of life that are highly naturalized, governed by natural events. In “The Etiquette of Freedom,” an essay which can be read in part as a revisionary updating of Emerson's Nature, and which aims to dismantle the civilized definition of nature as the opposite of culture, Snyder characterizes such a community as a “primary culture,” a society “whose economic system is in a close and sustainable relation to the local ecosystem,” and he gives a distinctly Fenollosan cast to his description of all “social organization” and “order in government” as “a set of forms that have been appropriated by the calculating mind from the operating principles in nature.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem , pp. 221 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996