Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Zhaoming Qian

Evening sun strikes over the mountain The far eastern village stands out as if near

the fields in betwwen [sic] are all hazy

and invisible I am sad at your going. full of envy,

my friend.

NOTES

(1) The "Fenollosa Notebooks," at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, consist of 82 folders. A number of them contain sheaves of leaves rather than notebooks; some contain material contributed by Pound rather than Fenollosa.

All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, Copyright (C) 1993 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, is used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents for the trustees, and by courtesy of the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (2) According to Yu, Wang Wei and symbolists share: (1) the notion of "a non-representational, suggestive poetry"; (2) "the preference for embodiment over assertion, the intuitively apprehended image over logically structured, propositional discourse"; (3) the "reliance on the image or symbol to convey meaning impersonally, rather than direct description or personal expression"; and (4) the notion of "poetry as the manifestation of a unitary principle" (22-28). (3) Early in 1909 Laurence Binyon invited Pound to a lecture he gave on "Oriental and European Art" (Stock 61). In the lecture Binyon may have touched upon Wang Wei's contribution to Chinese landscape painting as he had me in his work of the previous year, Painting in the Far East. (4) The two paintings are catalogued in Binyon's Guide to an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings in the P7int and Drawing Gallmy (1910). For an illustration of Chao Meng-fu's copy of Wang Wei, see Binyon 66. (5) Proofs of the date can be found in Pound's letters to Dorothy Shakespear. In a letter of 7 October 1913, Pound quotes from Giles's History (EP & DS 267). And in a letter of 11 October 1913 he tells Dorothy that she can have "Giles' |Hist. of Chinese Lit"' (270). (6) Fenollosa Notebook 15 contains the typescript of a columnar list of names and dates prepared by Pound presumably in late 1914, in which King Wen, Confucius, Ch'u Yuan, Mei Sheng, Lady Pan, T'ao Ch'ien, Wang Wei, and Li Po are marked as top literary figures. (7) In fact # 6 of a suite of seven quatrains titled "Farm Field Pleasure." The suite is believed to have been written after Wang Wei purchased the Wang Chuan country home miles east of the T'ang capital Chang'an, where he led a double life as official and recluse in his later years. (8) Pound may well have reworked all Fenollosa's versions of Wang Wei. I failed to locate his drafts for # 1, 2, and 9 in my summer 1990 search through Fenollosa Notebook 15. (9) In Fenollosa Notebook 7. (10) The Chinese Language and How to Learn It: A Manual for Beginners by Sir Walter Caine Hillier (1910 ed.) (EP & DS 298n). (11) Dasenbrock perceptively notes that The Pisan Cantos indicates a return to the Taoist poetic "developed at the time of Pound's first immersion in Oriental material" (226). (12) It was during the summer of 1916 that Pound wrote Iris Barry: "You should have a chance to see Fenollosa's big essay on verbs" (L 13 1), and again, "I have spent the day with Wang Wei" (144). In fact, Pound's effort to publish Fenollosa's essay and his experiments with Wang Wei persisted concomitandy through 1919.