Cultural or Aesthetic? ——An Intertextual Insight into the Relationship between Ezra Pound‟s Imagist Poems and Chinese Tang Poems

Abstract—To argue whether the relationship between Ezra Pound’s Imagist poems and Chinese Tang poems is cultural or aesthetic, this paper employs Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality as theoretical basis and takes an intertextual insight into their intrinsic associations. Fundamentally, Pound is seen as a figure who fervently established the potential relationship. On the one hand, the relationship can be cultural because Pound, before approaching Chinese Tang poems, had experienced an intertextual recognition of European culture and managed to make it Americanized. Meanwhile, when encountering Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s manuscripts, Pound became totally enthusiastic and hooked on Chinese culture and Chinese poetry and intentionally placed them in a highlighting position to compete with powerful European culture. On the other hand, the relationship can be aesthetic because Pound fulfilled his aesthetic experimental principles of Images based on his aesthetic ideology, and his Imagist poems are the crystallization of his aesthetic thoughts and literary beliefs. In the meantime, Pound’s Image had been concerned with defamiliarization so that readers had to catch the intricate connections between the objective descriptions and the concealed feelings or attached emotions, which made his aesthetic thoughts actualized. Briefly, it is hard to claim that the relationship between Ezra Pound’s Imagist poems and Chinese Tang poems is cultural or aesthetic. From the intertextual perspective, the relationship can be both cultural and aesthetic. Keywords-intertextual; cultural; aesthetic; Imagist poems; Chinese Tang poem