Enter the Tang Chat

It’s hard to hear around Cathay. As anyone a little bruised by the topic will tell you, Ezra Pound’s slim khaki-colored volume, the product of a hundred international coincidences, collaborations, and misreadings, went off like a bomb in the first year of a European war. It defined how “Chinese” poetry was thought to sound — observational, imagistic, elliptical, heavy on landscape and understated pathos — and used it to explode the maudlin hypotaxes of Georgian verse.