“Rock’s Land and Goullart’s”

Abstract Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage site, Lijiang in China’s mountainous southwest is not a renowned city in world history, yet there is no doubt that, after reading the works of Joseph Rock (1884–1962) and Peter Goullart (1901–1978), Ezra Pound perceived it as befitting such a status. Lijiang in Pound’s Cantos becomes both an ideal construct of the poetic mind and a real, achievable paradiso terrestre . In this glorified hieratic landscape, Pound places his friends who introduced him to the Naxi people and culture: Rock and Goullart. While Rock’s influence on Pound is clear to see in the published Cantos , to find Goullart’s name we must read Pound’s unpublished poetry drafts. By investigating Goullart’s previously unstudied correspondence, this essay makes the case that Goullart played an equally important role in Pound’s poetic construction of Lijiang.