ABSTRACT
To understand the role Chinese characters have played in the development of Modernist poetry in the English language the movement that marked the beginning of Modernist poetic aesthetics in the West. Chinese characters came to serve as illustrative support for Imagist poetics because of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s collaborative work on Chinese poetry. In 1913, Fenollosa’s widow contacted Pound and handed him her husband’s unpublished notes on Chinese poetry. In 1918, Pound edited and published in London Fenollosa’s essay titled “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” Fenollosa’s essay is a philosophical discussion of poetic aesthetics inspired by – to a great extent – misunderstandings about the nature of the Chinese writing system as well as some linguistic universals. Chinese, to him, offers an example of a language less constrained by grammar. Fenollosa’s observation about the flexibility in the parts of speech of Chinese also has some merit.
