Religion 3 : Confucianism and Taoism, for Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press

Religion 3 : Confucianism and Taoism, for Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press

Religion [3]: Confucianism and Taoism, for Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press

Robert E Kibler, Asst Professor of English, Valley City State University, 10 April 1999

In the early 1910s, Ezra Pound was introduced to Taoism and Confucianism—two of the mainstays of ancient Chinese philosophy. He was introduced to Taoism in 1913, when he found Taoist poems among the manuscripts of the late Asian art historian Ernest Fenollosa. Some time thereafter, Pound read G. M. Pauthier’s 1841 French translation of the four Confucian Classics—the Odes, the Great Digest, the Unwobbling Pivot, and the Analects. Through the many years, what may be seen as Taoist and Confucian sensibilities vied for control of Pound’s work, in the same way that the two had vied for control in ancient China. Although Pound condemned Taoism, the allusive aspects of his literary work have affinities with it. Although he always admired Confucianism, the dogmatic aspects of his work are partly the result of its influence.

Both Confucianism and Taoism developed between the sixth and fourth centuries B. C. in China. The philosophies are strikingly different. For Taoists, the Great Tao or “Way” is immeasurable and uncontrollable. Yet it is not beyond human apprehension. If people were still, free from willfulness and delusions of control, then they could recognize both the Great Tao and their own place within it. Movement and boundless energy characterize the Taoist universe, and Taoist poets often imagine their subject from an attitude of stillness while attempting to subtly portray an intellectual and emotional allusiveness that accords with the greater movement of the tao. Confucianism, however, is a practical, willful, and controlling philosophy that generally posits humankind as the center of its own universe. Its contrast with Taoism shows through the differing understanding of words that each philosophy possesses. Taoists believe that words are temporary conveyances of shifting meaning. Confucians believe that words contain and control meaning. Words serve as meaning-traps, without which meaning would drift and society would fall into disorder.

By December 1913 Pound was in possession of Fenollosa’s notes, including scores of translations of Chinese Taoist poetry. He quickly recognized that this poetry was terse, polished, and most importantly, emotionally suggestive. He had admired these qualities in the verse of Western classical and medieval poets such as Sappho and Dante, but had been unable to achieve the same effect in his own verse. Starting in 1913 however, the character of Pound’s work noticeably changed. This was especially evident in Cathay (1915) his volume of translations taken from the Fenollosa notes. Pound began to achieve with words what fellow poet T. S. Eliot suggested was the ability to actually modify inarticulate emotions by presenting them in precise words and images. In short, Pound’s poetry developed an emotional allusiveness. His “The Jewel Stair’s Grievance,” from Cathay, serves as a prime example:

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn

Both Fenollosa and Pound observed that “Jewel Stair’s” never tells its reader that a woman impatiently waits for someone—yet strained impatience is precisely the emotion produced by the poem. Such an emotional movement out of details towards emotional truth is typical of Taoist poetry.

At very nearly the same time that Pound was working through the Taoist poems in the Fenollosa notebooks, he began reading Pauthier’s Confucian translations. Unlike Taoist thought, which came to Pound first as poetry, Confucian thought first came to him as social and political science. Confucius was concerned with effective governance during a time of political instability in China. His philosophy proposed the maintenance of social order. This social order began with the precise definition of terms. This was necessary in order to explain the inarticulate thoughts of virtuous men in leadership roles. Their virtuous character extended outward from the individual leader until it was manifest as an entire state, living in virtue and harmony. Leaders, in effect, were the state. Others took their prescribed place within the social order. As can be imagined, the social application of Confucianism in China had a spotty history. Despite the best of intentions, its emphasis on order sometimes turned into obsession and towards intolerance of difference. More than once in the history of China, Confucian philosophy served as the warrant for human oppression.

Many Sinologists maintain that the less formal approach to life and living implied in Taoist (and later, Buddhist) philosophy served as a social corrective to Confucian rigidity in China. Certainly, from very early in Chinese history, typical Chinese people saw themselves as at once Confucian and Taoist, and the canonical texts of each philosophy show that each is crossbred with the other. Pound, however, did not have the hundreds of years of polemical contention behind him as did Chinese Confucianism and Taoism. He thus failed to recognize or obtain the kind of symbiotic understanding that the two philosophies in China had developed over time. Consequently, his work sometimes evokes a Taoist allusiveness, and at other times, illustrated the kind of rigidity to which Confucianism sometimes tended. Furthermore, in the 1920s, Pound began to combine his understanding of Confucianism with his understanding of Italian Fascism. As a result, his various calls for social and aesthetic order intensified. In 1927, for example, he published “Workshop Orchestration.” It envisioned a factory where the machines were tuned to make sounds like music. This was supposed to put workers and their machinery in harmony, and so increase production. Implicit in this vision was Pound’s willingness to subordinate the human spirit to the principle of social order. He had come to this willingness as much through his belief in Confucianism as from his belief in Fascism. But it stood in stark contrast to the Taoist sensibility that he had developed through translation and his ongoing work. Something clearly had to give. Many readers of Pound's work feel it was the poetry.

In the late 1930s, Pound read J. A. M. de Moryiac de Mailla’s Histoire Generale de la Chine, an eighteenth century French translation of a Chinese history text. De Mailla’s source had been a politicized Confucian account of Chinese history. It thus condemned Taoists and Buddhists for all social ills in China, and praised Confucians for all that had gone well. Pound likewise started a campaign of invective against Taoists in his writings. This campaign corresponded in time to the intensification of his efforts to promote the Confucian-Fascist Italian State. When that state finally collapsed in 1945, so did much of Pound’s Confucian vision. Many scholars note the resurgence of a Taoist sensibility in Pound’s work after this time. Pound never relinquished his affinity for Confucianism. But of the two philosophies, only Taoism could have underwritten the stillness, the allusiveness, and the humility displayed in one of the last cantos, where he writes as one adrift within what is great and moving and unknown:

A blown husk that is finished

but the light sings eternal

a pale flare over marshes,

where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change

Time, Space,

neither life nor death is the answer. (CXV)