ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the important role the works of the Chinese philosopher and public intellectual Confucius have played for the formation of the political and poetic cultures in the United States. Ezra Pound’s encounter with the Chinese language and his recovery of Confucian ideas in his Chinese and American Cantos includes Confucius’s influence on the Founding Fathers and the foundation of the United States of America. Pound’s poetic rendition of Confucius’s importance for the Enlightenment and for the moral constitution of American statecraft is both a characteristic feature of modern poetry’s intertextual evocation of classical sources and the recognition of transcultural relations between the long history of the Chinese tradition and the young American nation. Finally, Pound’s linkage of the two cultures and his poetic account of a moral basis of political power relates to the contemporary scene of the interrelation of Chinese and American cultures and the establishment of Confucius Institutes in the twenty-first century.
