THE CONFUCIAN ODES: Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius

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Ezra Pound - whom T. S. Eliot has called "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time" - here recreates for the English-speaking world the great poetry of ancient China. The 305 odes of the Classic Anthology are the living tradition in Chinese poetry. Since the fifth century before Christ, they have been as familiar to every literate Chinese as the Homeric poems were to the ancient Greeks. Indeed, Confucius held that no man was truly educated unless he had studied the odes; and, in the only "Apologie for Poetrie" in the history of China, he pronounced that the odes serve to exhilarate, to stimulate awareness, to preach dissociation, to kindle resentment against evil.

Mr. Pound's translation of the Classic Anthology is the culmination of forty years of Chinese study, which began with Cathay and continued through the Chinese Cantos, the Unwobbling Pivot, and the Confucian Analects. A translator whose work gives the illusion of being not mere translations but a "translucence," he makes these mysterious early poems spring to life and seem as contemporaneous as any modern verse.