GLOBALIZATION AND ITS EAST ASIAN PRECEDENTS

well, i really screwed up this time. i should have put 'body of article' (with the link) before that stupid copyright paragraph. A huge mistake in considering the proper design of user interface :)

Today is Ash Wednesday. I recall writing on Poetics/Politics in reply to a Chinese poet/activist Jiang PingChiao's writing. I normally don't get revelations in my own words since i always find that others before me say it better. Probably because Jiang was writing in Chinese, thus i feel like whatever i copied sounded more like from my own intellect this time.

The Topic is 'Is it that language create something or something create language?' ( http://hjclub.com/ShowTopic.asp?ID=2568792). Since hjclub.com site is being blocked to Chinese mainland users. I copy text here:

This reminds me of what W.H.Auden alludes to T.S. Eliot's radical effort on poetry in his poem 'Letter to Lord Byron' (1936), remarking, 'Eliot spoke the still unspoken word.' Many lasting poetic interventions reside in its ability to create life when life itself was being suffocated by brutal forces caught up in unprecedented social upheavals or between cultural sterilization.

T.S.Eliot wrote in one of his best-known essays, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.' And he makes the point that not only does the older work inform the new, but also vice versa: 'What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.' (海纳百川 www.hjclub.com)

Classic Chinese poets follow metrical forms. Traditional poetic form not only enhance the intensity of words but also in the form of calligraphical presentation. 朦胧, in my opinion, is simply a 朦胧 or fuzzy copy of free verse influenced by translations of great poetic works from western civilization. (海纳百川 www.hjclub.com)

To name a later Chinese poet whose poems have sinked into a nation's consciousness, i can only think of one person: Mao zedong. Unfortunately, Mao's poetic achievement is very much damped by his dominant political power. Regretfully, Eliot's influence hasn't reached the Middle Kingdom in Mao's time. 'Eliot's influence was singular in developing a type of literary investigation known as New Criticism, which was most influential in the years 1935-1960. New Criticism opposes 'extrinsic' approaches to literature, or those that depend on the biography and psychology of an author or the historical and sociological circumstances in which a work is composed. New Critics advocate the 'intrinsic' approach, which exclusively addresses the text and the selection and construction of its languages. Eliot's essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) prefigures the principles of New Criticism. Rejecting the individualism of Romantics such as John Keats, the essay advances the importance of impersonality in poetry: "The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.' What is most interesting is Delmore Schwartz wrote an essay 'The Literary Dictatorship of T.S. Eliot' (1949) . 'It demonstrates the resentment many readers have felt concerning the prominence of Eliot's ideas. Echoing William Carlos Williams and Delmore Schwartz, Harold Bloom notes in The Western Canon, 'I began my teaching career nearly forty years ago in an academic context dominated by the ideas of T.S. Eliot; ideas that roused me to fury, and against which I fought as vigorously as i could.' (海纳百川 www.hjclub.com)

I often felt that poetry equip us with wings of faith, can render service to human kind and human nation to restore 'dictatorship' within as many poets as a rich cultural heritage can provide so that no single man can dictate the history of commonwealth without being condemned till the end of human language.

On another note, you guys do anything special on Ash Wednesday? For me, i think i am going to _try_ reciting T.S.Eliot's Ash Wednesday. I was stunned when i first encounter a Brit lady reading the poem. Here's the full text of 'Ash Wednesday'. pardon me for any typo err.

Islam seems to have no role in the area as described in this article. Bin Ladin would probably like to see Islam to have the influcences in East Asia but it is the West which is most influential.