The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 1—Le Japonisme and Le Livre de Jade

The influence of East Asian literature on Western poetry is international and widespread. This influence bridges a variety of artistic movements that seem unrelated or even antithetical at first. You might even say the influence of East Asian literature is a defining quality of modernism in the West. 

In this series of blogs, I’m going to talk about three modern writers whose work was shaped in different ways by the writing of East Asia.

These poets from different parts of the world all used East Asian literature as an inspiration to move their own work forward in ways that would not have been possible without this literary legacy. The three writers are the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; the French modernist poet Jean Follain; and the U.S. writer of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac.

How did East Asian literature begin finding its way into the West? In the late nineteenth century, particularly in France, there was a craze, a hunger for all things East Asian. This artistic sensibility had a name. It was called Le Japonisme, or Japonism, although it referred not only to the arts in Japan but to all of East Asian art.

I first became aware of the depth of this influence when I toured the home of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet in Giverny, France.

Japanese prints in Claude Monet’s home, Giverny, France

I’m sure you’ve seen the images of the Japanese-style moon bridge in his garden that Monet painted almost obsessively. But when you enter Monet’s house, the influence of East Asian art is even more evident. Every image on every wall is a Japanese print of the Ukiyo-e masters. Monet owned no fewer than 117 Japanese prints, works by the artists Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai. 
We could easily trace the same line of influence from East Asian art to the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh:

Vincent van Gogh painting based on a Japanese print

or the posters of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, just to give a few examples.

But what does this influence in the visual arts have to do with literature? There was a literary Japonisme as well, a craze for all things East Asian in poetry.

This interest in East Asia became particularly popular with Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade: poésies traduites du chinois [The Book of Jade: Poetry Translated from the Chinese].

The Book of Jade is a volume of classical Chinese verse translated into French, with illustrations and reproductions of prints and calligraphy. 

Gautier’s anthology made an enormous splash when it was first published in Paris in 1902, but it was not the first or the only one of its kind. There have been many books that have popularized Eastern poetry for the West, published at key moments. Even before Le Livre de jade, collections of Chinese and Japanese classical poetry started appearing in France as early as 1862, with the Marquis de Saint-Denys’ Poésies de l’époque des Thang [Tang Dynasty Poetry], published in Paris.

An anthology of Japanese poetry appeared in Paris in 1871: Anthologie japonaise: poésies anciennes et modernes [A Japanese Anthology: Ancient and Modern Poetry], edited by Léon de Rosny. This collection featured a number of traditional tanka or waka, including poems with the typical subject of a lover waiting in vain for a beloved, a topic that we will see popping up in Western poetry as well.

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 2: The Akhmatova Bridge
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 3: Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 4—Jack Kerouac’s Haiku; and Conclusion

This series of blogs was originally written as a talk for the First Asian Literature Festival, Gwangju, South Korea, November 2017.

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Zack’s most recent book of poems, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging
Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 6: Populist Writers: the Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

To continue the thread of the last two blogs, which talked about populist writers Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder, I’m going to discuss other groups of American writers who I’m viewing as gathered under the populist umbrella.

A populist writer is not just one who writes about the United States, but a writer who believes that American life is a source of good, knowledge, and redemption. That’s why I’m not including in this particular post excellent writers such as Jane Smiley or Jane Hamilton, for instance. I think their view of American society is more pessimistic than the populists. I’ll talk about their writing in an upcoming blog.

Among other populist writers, we could add the playwright Arthur Miller, who dealt with ordinary Americans in some of his plays. Miller raised the lives of working people to the level of tragedy, a genre of literature that was formerly the domain of kings. I’m thinking in particular of his plays Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge—the latter play I analyzed in a blog earlier this year.

I’d also include as populists some of the writers of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac for On the Road, a book about discovering the hidden beauty of freeway America and the heartland.

I’d include many African American writers as populists, since a number of these authors are also champions of everyday Americans. I’m thinking of fiction writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, for example; and poets Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Sekou Sundiata. Ishmael Reed I'm saving for the blog on satirists—I see his sensibility differently.

The explosion of women’s fiction in the U.S. in the last several decades often has a populist impulse, finding extraordinary truths in the lives of people often considered ordinary. Some examples would be the writing of Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Berg, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, and Anne Tyler. Those authors focus on the intimate moments of American life that lead to large epiphanies. 

Ann Patchett

There are some male fiction writers who think along similar lines, such as Raymond Carver, definitely a detective searching for the small moments in American households that resonate deeply.

What’s interesting about the literary populism that has come out of the last several decades is that it’s not always an affirmation of all of American life. It’s sometimes an affirmation of a particular slice of American life, a slice often defined by the author’s race, ethnicity, national origin, class, gender, sexuality, etc. It’s a populism with an edge, a populism that overlaps with the critical approaches to American life that I’m going to discuss in the blogs that follow.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 1

When I first began studying literature seriously in college in the early 1970s, I was drawn to the most openly rebellious voices. I loved the Beat Generation, the Surrealists, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and the poets of the Black Arts Movement like my undergraduate mentor June Jordan. I still love them.

William Blake

During the period when I was a student, the New Left was at its peak. It was also the era when the movements against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement flourished in the United States. The doctrine of many revolutionaries at that time was that anything less than total revolt was irrelevant and self-defeating: “Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.”—“Those who make revolutions halfway have only dug their own graves.” I first encountered those words of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the French revolutionary from the period of the Terror, when Jean-Luc Godard quoted them in a movie. Godard was my artistic idol at the time. That quote embodied much of what my friends and I were thinking then about politics and art.

But the New Left, with its stir fry of Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, never came close to becoming a majority movement in the United States. Maybe that’s because the U.S. is generally allergic to isms. I came to realize that it was those who make revolutions all the way who only dig their own graves.

But what does all this have to do with literature? Well, the writers who openly declared themselves in revolt against the artistic and political establishment were clearly rebels to my adolescent or post-adolescent mind. Those were the writers whose stances I admired when I began my own literary attempts.

I’m not sure how I came to realize that there were actually many ways to express rebellion, dissent, and innovative ideas in literature, some of them bravely open, and some more subtle.

Maybe it was by reading the work of feminist writers, who often didn’t stand on a soapbox and declare their political viewpoints, writers such as Virginia Woolf. The slogan of the feminist writers of the 1980s, “The personal is political,” leant itself to a more nuanced aesthetic. If even the small moments in life have larger social significance, then a writer doesn’t have to scribble a manifesto to make a strong point. Understanding what is political in a poem by Sharon Olds isn’t like understanding the ideas of Mayakovsky or Amiri Baraka, where the writer is clearly waving a red flag.

Learning what is revolutionary about the more subtle rebels has been a lifelong study for me. In the next couple of blogs, I’ll talk about a couple of the writers where the social change implications of their work have only become clearer to me as I’ve read more.

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 2: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry