Modernizing Classical Poetics and Cultural Traditions: Wu Mi's Enterprise of Rewriting George Gordon Byron

Abstract

This article examines how Wu Mi (1894–1978), a well-known conservative intellectual, pursued his modernization program by rewriting George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), the British Romantic poet enthusiastically embraced by the iconoclastic New Culturalists in Republican China (1911–1949). Through analysis of his enterprise of imitating, translating, and interpreting Byron, I argue that Wu Mi intended to counter the New Culturalists’ monopoly of Byron's reception in China and to affirm his own vision of modern Chinese poetry and culture informed by Irving Babbitt's (1865–1933) New Humanism. Wu Mi portrayed Byron as a self-righteous poet-exile comparable to classical Chinese poets, invoked Byron's writing of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to invigorate classical Chinese poetics, exploited Byron's reflections on nature and history to vindicate China's cultural traditions, and appropriated his stanzas on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to support Babbitt's neo-humanistic arguments against romanticism. Wu Mi's rewriting enterprise, this article contends, shows that the so-called conservatives could assert their imagination of modernity by citing a foreign authority claimed by the iconoclasts, and that romantic poetry was woven into a narrative to modernize classical Chinese poetics.