Abstract
My thesis examines the two-way travels of space-related poetic ideas between Chinese and English-language poetry and explores the contact zones and new spaces created when ideas from different cultures encounter each other both in global space and in the world of poetry. On the one hand, the thesis explores how the Chinese poets Huang Zunxian黃遵憲 (1848–1905) and Bian Zhilin卞之琳 (1910–2000) adapt traditional Chinese spatial poetics to new geopolitical realities and in response to European poetics and literature; on the other hand, it traces how traditional Chinese spatial poetics and aesthetic concepts enter the English-language world and how the English-language authors Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), and Gary Snyder (1930– ) draw on these imported ideas in developing their own spatial poetics. The thesis begins by exploring the modern spatial poetics that emerges in the essays of Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929) on establishing China’s new poetry and in Huang’s poems of overseas travel and cosmopolitan life. Huang adapts traditional Chinese spatial poetics to address modern understandings of geography, geopolitics, distance and intimacy, speed, and global interconnectedness. The thesis goes on to analyse how in the early twentieth century Strachey and Pound drew on traditional Chinese aesthetic thought about poetic space, including the concepts of “meaning beyond words” and “rhythmic vitality.” It then examines how Bian’s poems and translations in the 1930s, as well as his theories of modern Chinese poetic form, extend the adaptation of traditional Chinese spatial poetics. Bian’s poetics of space addresses the shifting perspectives and scales engendered by geopolitical upheaval, modern media, maps, and translation. Finally, the thesis traces the further adaptation of traditional Chinese spatial aesthetics in Snyder’s “Cold Mountain” poems, in his translations of Tang poems, and in his forty-year-long poem Mountains and Rivers without End. The thesis complicates existing accounts of the modern Western appropriation of traditional Chinese aesthetics by exploring the differing but interconnected circulations of classical Chinese poetic ideas about space in both modern Chinese and English-language poetries. It shows how these circulations of Chinese spatial poetics are intimately related to the complex geopolitics of global modernity.