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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Zhaoming Qian

where one walks into Spagna

that T'ao Ch'ien heard the old Dynasty's music

as it might be at the Peach-blossom Fountain

where are smooth lawns with the clear stream

between them, silver, dividing (552)

So far, we haven't given a name to the style of concrete presentation, conflation, ellipsis, discontinuity, allusion, and juxtaposition that characterizes Pound's refashioned cantos from Ur-Canto 4 onward. The procedure, according to Bush, remained nameless until 1927, when Pound began to speak of it as the "ideogrammic method" (10). We have reason to believe now that the seed of this method was nourished between 1917 and 1919 through Pound's study of Fenollosa's essay on Chinese characters and the work of Wang Wei, de Gourmont, Laforgue, Eliot, and Joyce.(12)

In discussing Pound's development of the "ideogrammic method" critics tend to pay more attention to the source that provided its name and aesthetic framework than to the factors that contributed the substance. The fact is that Pound was in search of a theory promoting the kind of poetry he was constructing, and Fenollosa's essay appeared to serve the purpose ideally. Yes, we must understand that the essay's admiration for the alleged pictorial qualities of the Chinese written language is absurd and misleading. But, as Bush has observed, Pound's interest was in "the spirit of Fenollosa's remarks about oriental logic," and not in "their letter" (10). A proof for this, he points out, exists in one of Pound's 1919 notes to the essay: "These precautions should be broadly conceived. It is not so much their letter, as the underlying feeling of objectification and activity, that matters" (qtd. 179). So, for the Pound of 1919 Fenollosa's big essay was valuable principally because it offered him a way to account for the spirit underlying the poetry he was incorporating into his modern epic. In other words, in Pound's effort of 1917-1919 to modernize the style of his Ur-Cantos, Fenollosa's essay on Chinese characters served at most as a postulate that supported his spiritual sentiment, whereas the examples of Wang Wei, de Gourmont, Laforgue, Lewis, Eliot, Joyce, Cubist collage, etc., combined to supply the material and technique for the mode of presentation that gradually grew to be known as the "ideogrammic method."

To sum up, we see that what characterized Pound's transitional phase-the phase that witnessed the appearances of "Homage to Sextus Propertius" and his first refashioned Ur-Cantos-was his conscious effort to link past with present, and Eastern culture with Western culture. If prior to 1917 he had in the main submitted himself to one influence at a time, starting from 1917 he began to consciously bring all the influences together. Pound's modernist style for The Cantos is thus a style of superposition, superposing not just imagery upon emotion, but Wang Wei upon de Gourmont/laforgue, Kung upon Malatesta/ Adams-in short, past upon present and Eastern culture upon Western culture. As a literary figure clinging to Pound's mind for so long and contributing significantly to his modernist style, Wang Wei has a firm claim to our attention.