SOURCE: "Elegy and Personae in Ezra Pound's Cathay," in ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 261-81.

In the following essay, Xie discusses Pound's interpretation of Chinese verse in Cathay. According to Xie, Pound differs from "the Victorian masters of the elegiac before him" through "his skillful and extensive reliance upon the speaker-persona as the primary device for rendering subjective emotion and elegiac mood, as amply and successfully demonstrated in Cathay."

Pound first published his Personae in 1909, including two previous collections of his poems. The title "Personae" was used again for his collected poems of 1926, and for the selection from these of 1928. That Pound attached great importance to the idea of personae is best summed up in his "Vorticism" of September 1914, in which he called his translations as well as his poems but a series of "elaborate masks." By the time he wrote this, Pound had already...